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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.

Holiday Linkage

      

Make a Snowflake
Winter Solstice Celebrations
Advent Calendar
Christmas Through the Years
Winter Solstice Websites
History of the Holidays
Santa's FBI Wanted Poster
Antique Christmas Cards
A Singular Christmas
Ancient Origins: Solstice
Your Secret Christmas Name
Playdo Christmas Games
Holiplay
Giftmixer 3000
TreeMaze Maker
Reba's Victorian Postcards
The Christmas Resistance Movement
Buy Blue for Christmas
Fred, the Christmas Iguana

Thanks to lonita; Anne; and Pen-Elayne.  This could go on and on -- perhaps I will follow Anne's lead and do a Holiday links section on the sidebar.

Haiku and the Double Helix| What I Am Thinking About

From New Perspectives Quarterly:

The role of the scientific imagination in shaping the world to come is today uncertain as the great leaps forward . . . have revived old doubts and raised new fears about the human condition under the regime of reason. . . science is under attack both from religious extremists on the right who argue stem-cell research violates the sanctity of life as well as from "post-intelligent intellectuals" of the academic left who view science not as the discovery of objective reality through observation, but as a "social construction."

Religion

From Whiskey River:

"In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive ... For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion."

- D. H. Lawrence

The Pagan Agenda

This post is an experiment -- and a risky one.  As some of you know, I take sleeping pills (among others) as part of my medical treatment.  Usually these knock me out for the entire night, but occasionally my mind races and I get up in the night and do odd things, some of which I remember.  Last night, I got up and recorded a long ramble about the thinking I've been doing on religion and values, subsequent to the election. 

As you will see/ hear, I've been thinking about these issues a great deal, questioning my own values and beliefs.  This has brought me to the conclusion that, I'll be damned (at least many people will think so) -- I'm a pagan. 

So here is the recording.  I've transcribed it below, eliminating the umm's but otherwise staying fairly close to the original.