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Late Night Thinking

I look and look for my notes on a lecture (years ago) by Pattiann Rogers; then realize that even if I find them, there is no certainty that my notes accurately reflect what she said. What I remember is:

• Science is the new religion. It is what we believe in, even when we do not understand it. Do we understand, in our minds, in our bodies, why the airplane does not fall from the sky? Still, we step onto it.
• It is the poet's responsibility to -- explain? elucidate? give voice to? -- the religion of the time. We are failing.

Karen Armstrong's point, in The Battle for God, that:

• The fundamentalist error is to treat mythos ["a mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms"] as logos ["rational, logical, or scientific discourse"]
• The secularist error is to think that logos is all there is

Is mythos not the poet's role? So we are to, somehow, imbue logos/science with spirit? But science is spirit -- no? -- attention to the real, passion -- and sometimes, too often, cruelty without cause.

Can we study, learn, attend, without dissecting?

Who can look at the Hubble photographs, and not feel awe? not see spirit?

Oh, the same person who looks at a chickadee, or a grasshopper, or a stone, and does not see it.

So the poet must say:  look!  see!  -- a greater poet than I am.  An Emily.

I have wanted a non-gendered pronoun, so that I could speak of a creature (rampaging raccoon) whose gender I do not know, without denying its personhood, without making it an it -- but instead, I should be infusing the it pronoun with personhood, with spirit. For the teaching- stone is an it -- the mountain, the river, the garden --

-- & I will break the stone, weed the garden, dam the river, eat the raccoon (the cow, the chicken, the salmon) -- even though -- while -- acknowledging it is a person -- it is in-spirited --

because I am not consistent
because I am not logical
because I am not moral?
because I am an animal?

[is "it" a pronoun?]

Rumpelklaus

I had no idea that Christmas/Yule had so many scary traditions; this one is courtesy of Raspberry World (click photo to go there for larger image and story.)  Go here for more, even scarier images. 

Susie tells us:  Klausen are an old heathen tradition. They were originally meant to scare off bad demons. Today, they accompany Santa Claus when he visits homes  . . .

She also sends us to these sites, to show us this is not a dead tradition: Klausenverein, Die Berghofer Rumpelklausen, and Der Krampus (all in German.)

Sweet dreams.