"THE GIVEN TREE"

Each day I am confronted with the choice of whether or not to have hope, or have something else, akin to an idol. This becomes harder yet in the afternoon with the running of the wild bulls--"It was 5 in the afternoon" --Lorca, probably my favorite poet still--"one lone tree/one lone bird/ on the point of a pin/ is my soul girando (turning)

Poetry is always so difficult to unravel, from Shakespeare's Sonnets to The Wasteland. Are poets trying to be deliberately obscure? Certainly that is often the case--and we also tend to leave out the connecting points (hyperpersonal too much so in my case) and leave them to the imaginations of the readers--otherwise one gets a mere literal explanation or even a sermon--the meaning of the word, "prosaic" often means a more tedious style in which the author tells you what to think with a precision meant for a universal interpretation if not a universal audience...

But what comes closer to our experiences of life? The seeming disjointedness of the poetic stream? Or the literal post hoc ad majoram "analyze this!" ? I often find rationalistic explanations unrepresentative of the confusion of this life, as referred to by Camus in the last posting. It is the constant struggle of the poet to get the balance right between particulars and universals, a struggle well represented by the life's work of Leonardo da Vinci and most artists, particularly since the Renaissance; but also seen in the earliest books such as Job. When can we ask, "Why me?" without suffering the greater view, to "wit", "Why not you?" hahaha (sorry- it sounded funny the first time)

But when people cease to admit that they are confused and become literal-minded and sure of themselves and of their opinion-makers, then we proceed from the relative and transient balance of freedom/confusion into the "Enlightenment."
Our country, like it or not, is based on a delicate balance between, or an oil/water mixture of, Enlightenment and Reformation thinking. On the one hand we can so easily translate superficial certainties into a Reign of Terror which has been repeated over and over again worldwide, often thanks to French and German philosophies which tend towards materialistic reductionism ending in mere power struggles with ourselves (we are never satisfied with the "jihad within", are we?) (I speak only here from a male point of view but have often observed the results of similar thinking in the other half of the race)

But as Enlightenment quickly unraveled into Napoleon, Reformation thinking can also quickly devolve into religious formulas, which are no adequate defense against Hitlers or Mussolinis. Becoming, God forbid, a "state religion" reduces God to a very small and easily manipulable entity who becomes then a mere abstraction, as we too often see in "mainline" Protestantism in America--but not so much in the ascending third world.

This is a far cry from the God of Isaiah 6!!! The "numinous" God as He appears through the ineluctalble Holy Spirit is, I am finding, totally unmanageable, which is perhaps why "few find it," because precious few are willing to let God be God. (mein kampf, yo!!) It becomes a control issue i.e. politics as usual--one finds these frustrations easily in Camus with his experiences of both politics (Sartre) and religion (joined at the hip for so many centuries and still so in Europe, only this time to the new protestantism, the cultural civic religion of atheism/agnosis/ anti-supernaturalism/Sadduceeism, which has become the fastest growing religion of white Europeans with Islam being a formidable and legalistic Pharisee-reaction to this vacuum.)

There is no question that French thinking has greatly affected Southeast Asia via colonialism; but it was not the "confused" and increasingly apolitical thinking of Camus that was the star influence but Sarte's arbitrary and anti-teleological activism, which literally reduced a man to a biological zero , in which a king was the same as the drunk in the gutter was the same as a bubonic rat; and this being so, all men are equal--equally disposable in front of the juggernaught of politics/religion and can be rolled over at will. From the Reign of Terror to Stalin (Were the Russians not just a little bit over-awed by the French, even after Napoleon? ) to Cambodia ad nauseam --see Sartre's book. "Hell is other people." (how would he know?- he didn't even experience the worldwide hell he helped to create but was content to be lionized by that which he hated, i.e."other people".)

The point of the blogging of Mumma's testimony is not to portray the strengths of religion or denomination but to highlight that the point of departure of Camus from Sartre, and the cause of their apparently permanent rift, was precisely over whether or not human nature was a "given" or if by artificial selection man could become anything that a powerful Ubermensch/plotter/planner/enlightened communitarianism could devise; if nothing else, the tyranny of the majority is our perpetual default setting, whether we be the bourgeois or proles, when the elites have had their chance. But the very word "given" starts a chain of inquiry as to a state of grace/pain and who or what may be the Giver--which Camus pursued and may have been more than a seeker by the time he wrapped his car around an American tree! (He was never formally baptized at least not in public)



But read Isaiah 6, esp. the last verse, which is almost never quoted, but talks of trees. I like that, because as the song goes, Wood Hath Hope. Trees can of course be made into Deadwood Idols--but one must first separate this wood from the ground, that is, its source. Idols, by definition, don't move, they have to be dead and dead certain, like abstract ideologies are. But with even a stump, which is still firmly attatched to the ground and exposed to light, there is the possibility of life, and starting over--which is what I am trying to do now.
(The Rod that is of The Root of Jesse being the most sublime example)

P.S. The "teil tree" is another word for a linden tree, which in this verse is coupled to an oak tree--while neither one produce edible fruit, in Jesus' day the fruitful tree had become unfruitful even after much care and many fertilization attempts/opportunities was cursed to its roots; and that fig became the one from which, "no one will ever eat fruit again." Is it so? Even now? "Conmigo?"

But many other trees, of then and now, have remained "rooted and grounded." (even though few of us care for acorn stew--although our Native Americans did have some recipes.) But for one small thing, it does explain the same "Linden Oaks'" which is the name of a psychiatric facility in Naperville IL. A friend of mine, a Christian and academic child psychiatrist Rockford IL, attempted to start one in Rockford, but it didn't fly there. The point of Linden Oaks is for individual healing with the fully human perspective included, not viewing man as something from which we merely earn a living but as fully but brokenly imago dei...

"But yet it shall be the tenth, and it shall return, and shall be eaten: as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof."

"Here am I" (said the poet) "send me!" (6:8)