Trapped in a motel in Escanaba

[/rant mode/ alert]

And now I feel like crap. I was feeling okay awhile ago, but then feelings rush over you like the weather, and your internal weather changes in an instant, and that's that.

What am I doing in a hotel room again? Well, I was hoping to camp these past two nights, since it was unseasonably warm. But that didn't work out, in part because on neither night did I really have the energy to do it; plus as soon as I get really tired, I begin coughing like a consumptive, a leftover from that cold/flu I had three weeks (or more) ago. It's like the dread night fungus keeps growing in your lungs, a mad parasite of neglect. *cough cough* I just didn't have enough spoons for camping. I'm a little annoyed about that. I'm also determined to "Escape From Wisconsin" again in the near future, and go camping when it's a few weeks warmer, and I'm a few weeks more rested.

Escape From Wisconsin.

No offense, folks, but Wisconsin has turned into a toxic sludge morass hellpit for me. I must leave. I must find better pastures elsewhere. It's not your fault, unless you voted for anything Republican in Wisconsin since 2008, in which case it's at least your fault that I can't find work, that the economy in WI tanked and hasn't recovered, that our current Governor is a hollow man who only ambition is personal and who has done more to tear the net of the social contract than any past Governor of WI ever dreamed possible, creating a social climate in which sociopathy is in ascendance and empathy is a quaint notion of yesteryear. In which case, we are reaping the whirlwind that you sowed, and gods bless you and keep you safe. For me, not so much. So my big job over the next several weeks is basically finding the best way to get the frak out of Dodge City, in such a way as to not destroy my health again in the process.

I'm also feeling trapped and unhappy in this Escanaba hotel room because tomorrow I have to go back into the venomous black hole sludge pit that Wisconsin has become for me. When I hit the road to head up to Minneapolis, then up to Duluth and Lake Superior, I was quite calm and even happy. As soon as I turn around to go back into Wisconsin, I begin to feel like crap. This has happened every time I've had to go back home in the past two or three years. Why? Because my life has been a hell of loss and desolation, and all of that happened between Beloit and Madison.

Trust me, though, there have been some astoundingly superb, wonderful and good things that have also happened in that same tanged timespace locus, and for which I have only good memories and grateful feelings. Yet the scales are nowhere near balanced. The good is no longer either necessary or sufficient to maintain a desire to try to make things work out, in a place where nothing has worked out (well, mostly nothing), and every year of the ten years since I moved back to WI has been worse than the previous, not better. I moved back to be the full-time live-in caregiver for my parents, giving up my own life and career—with no regrets—during which I almost died. I mean that literally: an undiagnosed chronic illness that I had had for at least 15 or 20 years by that time was driven into an acute and near-lethal phase by the strain of being a full-time live-in caregiver, and then having to deal with everything that followed upon the deaths of my parents. There was a house with thirty years of Stuff to sort through and get rid of, just for starters. It was more than I could deal with, and I did have a lot of help dealing with it—for which I will forever be grateful, because without that angelic help I'd probably be dead. Literally. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not being a drama queen. I am reporting what my doctors said to me over the past few years: without help, I'd be dead.

If you are ever ashamed of asking for help from your friends, get over it, grow the frak up, swallow your pride and your shame and your guilt, and FUCKING ASK FOR HELP. It will be there. Maybe not always, and maybe only in limited ways, and maybe not in the forms that you expect it to be in—but it WILL be there.

I'm feeling like crap tonight, and writing it all out. You are not required to read it, or respond, or do a frakking thing about it. The truth is very simple: sometimes all I really need is to fell like just one person has actively heard me. And then I can go on. This does not require "fixing." It requires listening. Nothing more, nothing less.

I used to have friends, now apparently former friends, who are now afraid of me, apparently, because I'm too intense for them. Well, I would respectfully point out that almost dying (twice, not just the once reported above) can kind of make you so aware of the basic realities of life that you do get a little intense. It deeply sorts out your priorities in life, and fairly brutally. I am so very aware that No One Here Gets Out Alive. So get over your fucking ego selves and just start being good to each other.

That's all. That's really all that it's about.

We might all be born into the species homo sapiens sapiens, but that does automatically make you into a human being. It gives you the POTENTIAL to BECOME a human being, a fully realized, adult, grown up human being, capable of both competency in life and being aware that the Golden Rule basically reduces to: Don't be a dick to each other. Just fucking be nice to each other. Apparently this needs to be shouted from the rooftops far more often than it has been; certainly centuries of social and spiritual evolution have yet to convert the majority of homo sapiens sapiens away from being monkeys throwing excrement at each other through the bars of their cages. Which is what you get if you don't develop your potential to become a human being. You need to take that potential and DO something with it. Otherwise you're just a smart mammal, and not a fully realized human being.

I readily admit to the vice of impatience, because my hyper-acute awareness of mortality, stemming from almost dying, twice, leaves me with no desire to see love wasted, or time wasted. You are no longer allowed to be bored: you don't have time for it. Life's too short. If you ever find yourself approaching the Kingdom of Boredom (which ultimately lies within you), take another road immediately, towards something much less deadly to the heart and mind. Life's too short to waste being bored. Seriously.

Before I began typing out this annoyed longish rant, I wrote an annoyed little song lyric, for a bad song I'll never actually write, which began with the phrases: "Trapped in a motel in Escanaba / there's nothing wrong / but there's nothing right." That's when I knew I was feeling bad, rather than good. Sometimes you don't know what you're feeling or thinking till you make art about it. Which is another frakking reason to make art about everything. Figure it out.

Here's the whole song lyric. Oh, and by the way, [/end rant mode/]

Trapped in a motel in Escanaba
there's nothing wrong
but there's nothing right

If I'd had my way
I'd be camped by the water
drinking in the campfire light

But here I am in a cheap motel
the water's fine but the heat don't work
the night's fooled up, the neighbor's a jerk
but somehow we'll have to get through because
we're all trapped in a motel in Escanaba

What Offends Me Most in the Public Arena is Sloppy Thinking

What follows below began as a reply to a comment elsewhere. I expand it here, because there's a point to be made. During the next year, when political and social discourse is only going to get more and more heated, and stupid, and partisan, and uncivil, do think hard about what you're going to say, before you open your mouth and prove yourself to be an idiot. NONE of my friends are idiots; and occasionally some of them do look that way. Why? Read on. (I won't be offended if you don't; however, next time we disagree on something, I might not take you very seriously.)

•

Lots of folks get offended very easily these days. The interwebs are full of outrage, and manufactured outrage, and partisan political discourse, and angry rhetoric, and name-calling ad hominem attacks, and friends yelling at each other because of some political opinion. Its ridiculous. As if people cannot bear to be disagreed with, ever, for any reason. But the echo-chamber of complete agreement does not serve us in the public intellectual arena: you cannot go deeper into your own beliefs and understanding if they are never questioned.

I don't say I never get offended; I do. However, what I find offensive is rarely about the content of your argument, but rather about the consistency and logic of your argument. I get along perfectly well with people I disagree with on many issues; I get along poorly with people who throw half-baked aphorisms at me and expect to nod my head in instant agreement. Even if I otherwise agree with them on many points, I don't give their half-baked opinions a free pass just because I mostly agree. This does offend people, yes. Such friends do get upset with me when I point out the gigantic holes in their arguments; they need to get used to that, because that's not going to change. I think for myself, do my own research, and rarely take things at face value.

Because what offends me most is not the contents of peoples' opinions, no matter how bizarre, but the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that they present.

The main thing that ever strongly offends me is blatant hypocrisy. Inconsistent logic comes a close second, though. (Hypocrisy itself is logically inconsistent, of course, which is one reason it's so heinous.) Most of the comments I make in socio-political discussions are to point out where rhetoric and logic aren't being used correctly, or at all. Which does offend some folk who prefer that their prejudices not be questioned or exposed to the light of logic. Typically, ad hominem personal attacks come from those who fear that their argument doesn't have a logical leg to stand on.

Sadly, this is true for atheists just as much as it is for religious believers. It is as true for progressives as it is for conservatives—although experience teaches that progressives generally tend to do their research more thoroughly than do conservatives. Again, the point is logical consistency, not the contents of your argument. For example, if people claim to be driven by reason rather than prejudice or superstition, they must consistently apply reason to their own arguments, and expose their underlying assumptions to the light of reason. No pre-judgment and no underlying assumption gets a free pass.

No one should be tolerant of prejudice or unreason, not even their own. No one gets a free pass.

I am not required to tolerate intolerance, prejudice, stupidity, or poorly-informed opinion. In fact, as followers and fans of Mark Twain, it is a public service to skewer faulty reason and prejudicial thinking wherever one encounters it. Even, yes, amongst one's erstwhile allies.

For example, while it is perfectly possible to hate that abortions happen and still be pro-choice—i.e. in favor of women having the right to manage their own bodies and their own health, while also wishing that every child was a wanted child—you cannot pretend to be logically consistent if you want to defund Planned Parenthood and still claim to be pro-women's rights: those two positions are oxymoronic when placed side by side, and yes you do look misogynistic when you attempt to do so.

For example, you cannot use the inflamed rhetoric of your antagonist without looking like a mirror image of your antagonist. You cannot call your interlocutor an idiot without opening yourself to the same charge. You cannot insist that your opponent's argument be subjected to rigorous logic and scientific experiment without exposing your own arguments to the same requirement. No double standards are allowable, ever. Period.

What also offends me is when people repeat a meme without fact-checking it; especially if that meme came from certain sources. Always Consider The Source (CTS). For example, Planned Parenthood receives Federal funding, yes, but none of that Federal funding goes to support abortion services; furthermore, Planned Parenthood provides many services such as birth control—which prevents unwanted pregnancies, and therefore reduces the incidence of abortions as well—and the abortion services they provide are only a fraction of their services. If you believe otherwise, you have bought into the disinformation smear campaign of the political right wing, and you need to check your facts. For example, if you believe that right wing charities and ethically and morally superior to charities that are either political neutral or sponsored by generally progressive religious groups such as the Methodists, you again need to check you facts, and not assume that every piece of disinformation you read is accurate or authentic.

Data overrules half-baked opinion, every time. Fact overrules political prejudice, every time. Period. Know your facts before you open your mouth, or you can expect to be challenged.

People, you look really stupid and uninformed if you repeat a meme because it agrees with your prejudices, or your well-considered opinions, but is provable disinformation or lies. (CTS)

People seem to get offended whenever I present a nuanced opinion rather than total agreement with whatever their current bumper-sticker opinion is. People also get offended when I point out the holes in their arguments. Oh well.

Finally, we all can be wrong. I can be wrong, you can be wrong, people you admire and respect can be wrong. The history of politics as well as the history of science is littered with strongly held beliefs proven to be wrong at a later date.

But here's the problem with being wrong: If you never admit you're wrong, or apologize for making a mistake, you have no credibility. By admitting when you're wrong, and moving on, you both grow as a person, and your group grows in wisdom. If you are completely unable to admit you are wrong, as people of fixed prejudices are unable to admit the light of reason into their opinions, you are a hypocrite, and logically inconsistent, and everything wrong that I've been talking about here. When you discover you're wrong, admit it, and move on. There is honor is honesty. There is no honor is face-saving lies.

If someone disagrees with you, you TALK to them about it. You find out if in fact you substantially disagree, or if it's mostly semantic. Coexistence requires communication. And that requires getting outside the comfort zone of your dearly-held opinions. It requires you to let them be challenged, so that you can hone them, or change them if required.

Gathered Leaves

Recent journal entries of varying profundity, somewhat at random:

•

One of the most important, yet unnumbered, rules of wizardry:

You are required to leave the world a finer place than it was when you found it. Always work to make the world a finer place.

Your constant adversary is entropy. That long slide into the dark.

As one wizard once said, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas)

•

Someone, perhaps someone who doesn't even know you, gets it into their head that you're an asshole.
So they start treating you as if you were an asshole.
They act like an asshole towards you.
In self-defense you start responding to them like an asshole, because they're acting like an asshole.
Then they point their finder at you and shout, "Look! I said you were an asshole, and you are!"
Because now they have pushed you into acting just the way they expected you to act.

The name for this process is:

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

And that, dear friends, is the danger of having expectations in the absence of experience or data.

•

At some point I suppose people will figure out that merely stating the obvious does not constitute an actual revelation.

That doesn't mean it's not a personal epiphany to the person who just had it. And when said person takes their epiphany to their spiritual master, who then laughs, "well, duh," then a certain amount of humility is in order.

Because what's really toxic amongst seekers after personal growth and/or enlightenment is spiritual ambition and spiritual hubris. And most of the time we don't even know we're doing it.

As the Zen masters have said, Ambition in seeking enlightenment will prevent you from achieving enlightenment. Just sit there!

•

In India, there is a Hindu tradition that comes out of the belief that the Divine exists in all of us, in everything, in everyone, all the time.

A person who needs to talk to the Divine, who just needs to be heard, for whatever is bothering them, will go up to a stranger, and ask "Will you be God for me?"

Which means, that the one asked will sit and listen, standing in for that person's God, as the person pours out their soul and heart to their Divine. (Its not always out of desperation or something bad, by the way.) This is always meant to be a temporary job, not a permanent one. The person is asking to talk to their God through a channel of another person, since the Divine Immanence is in everything and everyone.

We all sometimes need a Face of God that we can personally connect with. Most people connect better to an image of the Divine (what Joseph Campbell called the Masks of God) that they can relate to, that they feel they can talk to directly, and be heard. Westerners who discover this tradition in Hindu India are often amazed; but if you think about it, this isn't radically different than praying at the foot of a statue of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The main difference is that in the Abrahamic religions God is thought to be transcendent, while in India God is thought it be immanent and transcendent.

As the stand-in for God, you don't have to do anything but listen, and listen with your heart. The gods behind all of reality, behind us, will hear. When the person who asked you to be God for them are done, you bless them, as God. If they ask God for advice, all you have to do is get yourself out of the way and let the Divine speak through you. Speak from your heart, and it will be true.

Anyway, this tradition always seems to work, and the person gets what they need. After the speaking to God is done, both people get up, feeling blessed, and depart, probably never to see each other again.

•

Any attempts to ascribe simplistic explanations of cause and effect to events in dreamtime are doomed to equivocacy.

First, because in dreamtime, time itself is neither linear nor narrative. Second, because in dreamtime, spacerime is malleable and non-relativistic. Third, because simplistic explanations of anything are usually just wrong, anyway.

Lessons from Having Been Bullied 5: the Dark Night

It's entirely possible to be someone who has gone through the dark night of the soul and at the same time do one's best to be a positive thinker. To wish to live in the light, and to share the values of most of the positive thinkers.

It is, however, not possible to have survived the dark night of the soul and still believe that positive thinking alone is enough, by itself, to get you through. It's not possible to be a Pollyanna wishful thinker. It's no longer possible to ignore that bad things do happen to good people.

It's no longer possible to pursue the light in denial or rejection of the dark, because you know the dark personally. You've become good friends. You've even moved in together and been roommates for awhile.

Sometimes it feels like at least some of the positive thinkers are infected with some kind of willful denial, a rejection. It just doesn't seem realistic.

Maybe it's because I've been through the dark night, or maybe it's because I was bullied a lot when young—one of the key lessons of that being that you know how people often conceal things even from themselves—and I cannot help but feel, sometimes, that some positive thinkers I've met are hiding something from themselves (or us), or suppressing it or denying. Or perhaps it's that people who have not survived the dark night—and I have met many just like this—really just have no comprehension of the more shadowy sides of life's colorful palette. They just don't get it, because they haven't experienced it. I don't know. I just wonder sometimes.

I've told my story of being bullied (for being gay, for being smart, for having grown up overseas, for just being different) to some of my friends who are dedicated to being positive in all aspects of their lives, and some of them just don't seem to get it. They're politely accepting, but you see it in their eyes, in how they won't look at you with real focus or conviction, like they really don't believe you, or maybe just don't want to.

This is not a criticism of any of my friends. It's just something you notice from time to time.

And when you tell someone you've been bullied, and they clearly don't believe you, even if they are polite about it, what are you supposed to do with that? It's looks too much like the people who didn't believe you when you were being bullied as a kid, and who did nothing to stop it, and often were in complete denial about it. When you've been bullied, one of the lasting effects is a distrust of figures of authority, because they were either clueless or powerless to stop the bullying, back then. When people deny that this happened to you, they sound a lot like the bullies themselves, who are really good at denying to the authority figures that they've done anything wrong, even when they're caught doing it. It creates substantial cognitive dissonance.

This all comes to mind because one sees the media talking heads right now asking how a big tough rookie football player in Miami could possibly have been bullied by his teammates. Neglecting to mention that they're just as big or bigger than he is. Or that rookies always get extra shit from the rest of the team. And then of course there are the comments that it's just boys being boys, roughhousing, hazing, all that stuff that serves as the usual excuses not to believe that bullying is going on, or to stop it. It's all just fun and games and you shouldn't take it seriously.

But that's the denial line. That's the rejection line. It's very odd to hear that line coming from someone who declares themselves to be a positive thinker. It makes you wonder if there's a man behind the curtain. It makes you wonder if there's denial.

One thing you learn from the dark night is just how common denial is. You don't learn this from the dark night itself, because what the dark night does is strip away illusions and denials and suppressions, leaving you naked and alone in the desert of your spirit. You learn about the commonness of denial when you return to and re-enter everyday life, when your experience has changed you and given you insight into what people do and say, most of which no longer seems real or substantial to you, after the dark night, but itself illusory. And then you try to articulate what you've been through, and no one wants to hear it. It's politely rejected, and denied, and ignored. Probably it makes most people uncomfortable. Which is all fine and good, until the moment their discomfort leads them to try to deny your experience. Incomprehension, cognitive dissonance, denial.

So, there are no answers here, just some observed realities, some speculations.

I'll say it again, just to be clear: I think positive thinking is great. It's just that it doesn't always ring true. If it's in denial of the darker shades of experience, it becomes shallow and one-sided to be believable. You can't really see Heaven till you've been standing in Hell. And that's how the dark night deepens the light side of experience. It gives it dimensionality. It gives it depth. And that matters, if you want to be whole.

Sacred Madness

Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness: open your eyes and look around you—madness is in the saddle anyhow.
—Norman O. Brown

The old saying goes, When the world has gone mad, the sane appear to be mad. But it's not we who are insane, we're sane people in an insane world.

Of course, maintaining that awareness requires a certain degree of self-confidence, of belief in oneself and one's own inner compass. It's easy to get pulled off balance if you doubt your own sanity. As a character in a drama once said, though, I may act crazy sometimes, but I am not insane. Acting crazy is sometimes how you stay sane.

I propose that in the coming weeks you make an effort to get more accustomed to and comfortable with the understanding that the entire world is in the throes of utter lunacy. Once you are at peace with that, I hope you will commit yourself to the sacred kind of lunacy—the kind that bestows wild blessings and perpetrates unreasonable beauty and cultivates the healing power of outlandish pleasure.
—Rob Brezsny

Enacting sacred madness appeals to me just now. i've known for some months now, since the surgery, that making art is the one thing that has kept me alive, kept me sane, kept me going, even to the root level of having a reason to keep going, a reason to go on living and making art. There's a need for me to act a little crazy, just to stay sane. Of course, I get called crazy anyway, by the forces of mediocrity, merely for questioning them, and wanting to do things a little differently.

Sacred lunacy is just what the world needs right now. We all could use some sacred clowning by the heyoka spirits to get us back into balance, and get some perspective about how life has gone crazy these past few years. Truly, as the ancient Chinese curse goes, we are living in interesting times.

Loss of art is a social sin. With that deprivation our work life becomes distorted and violent, and so too does our leisure time. [Video] games that announce the killing of galaxies takes over. Or titillating sex. Or titillating news. Or titillating anything. Life can no longer be lived or celebrated in depth. Superficiality reigns.
—Matthew Fox

We live in a dangerously over-stimulating time. We are inundated with noise, loud advertisements, bright and brilliant flashing lights on billboards and theatre marquees. We're encouraged to sit passively before our TV screens, or our computers, and passively absorb the entertainment beamed to us. And of course the loud, bright advertisements interspersed between the things you actually might want to watch.

Performance is life. Entertainment is death.
—Hakim Bey

Entertainment is deadening. It is the opposite of life, because it requires no participation, merely passive absorption. Making art is performance, which is active. Even when listening to music, you can be an active listener or a passive one. Active listening engages with the music. Passive listening just lets it wash over you like a warm bath.

In addition to being overstimulated, we also live in times that are antithetical to art. Seriously, think about it. We are bathed in entertainment while at the same time fine art is disparaged as elitist and obscurantist. Some postmodern artists exacerbate this problem, of course, by indeed being elitist and obscure. Poets wonder why they have no audience, yet continue to write new work that requires specialist academic knowledge to comprehend: a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's a chicken-or-egg dilemma, since for over a century now the lords of business have declared that only pragmatic, tangible products have any value, while other things have no value because they cannot be sold—and we've gone along with this belief, in our practice of monetizing everything, and determining value on sales. Great fine art of the past has sold for many millions of dollars. Art is only valued when it's a commodity, in this way of thinking. That's why entertainment is valued over fine art: it's easier to sell. And that's where the sin comes in, the social sin of losing art.

In this cynical climate, what could be more radical, what could be a more sacred act of madness, than to proclaim that beauty matters. Genuine beauty, not ironic, distanced, artificial beauty. The plasticized images of beauty seen in beauty pageants, pornography, or heavily-made-up icons of cinema are not what we mean by real beauty: those are all illusions. Real sex isn't pretty, because it's earthy. There is no airbrushing.

Beauty has to do with seeing all life as blessing, with returning blessing for blessing, with forging blessing of pain and suffering and tragedy and loss. Beauty needs to be made and remade. It is the vital work of the artist within ourselves. . . . I believe that beauty is better understood as an adjective than as a noun. Rather than pursuing the question, What is beauty? I believe it is more useful to ask the question, What are beautiful experiences you have had? And how can we forge more beauty from our common sharing of this planet? An inevitable consequence of asking such a question is the truth that beauty is simple and it is shareable.
—Matthew Fox

It is finished in beauty.
—Navajo chant

The Tissue of Experience

The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? That is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has its place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.
—Stanley Kunitz, poet

How indeed can experience and feeling be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? But that's exactly what we're told to do, these days, in this late-stage postmodern mannerist period in PoetryWorld. Anyone who objects to this trend, with the exception of elder statesman such as Kunitz, gets laughed out of the tangled labyrinths of academic poetry and criticism. Sincerity and meaning are forbidden as unfashionable. The current fashion is precisely what Kunitz above says does not work. And don't forget the required dash of irony.

I enjoy Kunitz' final note about transcending reason and erotic play: that's the real poetry. When poetry stays all in the mind, when it's about nothing but reason, when there's no eros in it, it fails. Poems written only from the head ultimately fail.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
—Jacques Maritain, philosopher

The French philosopher and writer agrees. Bloodless poetry, overly rational poetry, is incomplete. A poem that hasn't been bled on, at least a little, is not a whole experience. How can we expect poets to be able to change the world in any way when we also expect them to be passive, intellectual, and bloodless? There is no equation that adds up.

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant," where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observers and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved (fondu) in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.
—Gaston Bachelard, philosopher, The Poetics of Reverie

Another French philosopher and writer. The Poetics of Reverie was a book I first read decades ago, when I barely had enough life-experience to understand it. But Bachelard was discussing the connection between dreaming, the Dreamtime, and creativity, which I already knew was there. He was articulating something I already knew to be true. So I pursued reading the book, even though it had little clarity for me till some years later. that silent peace is something I have always known, often wordless, always immersive, the very essence of what Kunitz calls the tissue of experience. That silence upon which all words are founded, which they all arise from and all fall back into, that silence is the very fabric of existence.

An artist says, "I started being an artist when I was five years old." Well, so what? So did everybody. At that age, everyone's an artist. What makes you an artist is that you keep making art when everyone else stops being an artist. You keep going, while they don't.
—Vic Muniz, artist, in an interview

I did stop making art, for awhile, earlier in life. I didn't stop being creative, as I was still writing and making music, but i did stop making visual art. Then I started again. Photography is and always has been the core of that. I started making mature, decent photographs, when I traveled overseas, specifically in Indonesia. Each time I travel, still, I get better as a photographer. Photography and Photoshop was and still is the artistic tool, my palette knife as it were, that got me going, that liberated me technically, that allowed me to make the images I was seeing in my head but didn't have the manual skills to draw or paint.

There's no separation anymore. On the world's most difficult day, I can still make something, eventually. I might fight against it all day long, exhausted and spent by other things, and finally at the end of the day, with the last ounce of strength, then it's done. Tonight the moon was riding above white cumulus clouds; now it's hovering, half-size, above the backyard pines. How do you fight the tendency for art to crystallize and turn solid, and loose its fluid life?

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg, poet

Ignore the party line. I don't think poetry is only self-expression, and neither did Ginsberg. But he did think it could be used to express parts of the self the tribe would perhaps rather we didn't express. Poetry is transgressive, not tame. Poetry that is tamed, as Kunitz says, is reasonable, rational, powerless. Ginsberg at his best was all about re-empowering poetry: not the poet, but Poetry. The rational poets would criticize Ginsberg and his ilk as being too self-indulgent, too ecstatic, too unpredictable, too vulgar—by which they meant that he was not to be tamed, and he did not toe the party line. There are several party lines these days in Poetryworld, but most of them are inherently tame, and aren't going to break free of anything, or into anything.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual—when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions—it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer, novelist and storyteller

This is Singer agreeing with Kunitz, though it's likely they never heard these sentiments directly from each other. Great minds think alike, come to the same conclusions, and say some similar things. Singer acknowledges the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the left and right sides of the brain (mind, really, but let's use the conceptual cliché for the moment nonetheless), and expresses that tension as a conflict. But like Kunitz, Singer also implies that it's in the union of emotion and intellect, of passion and craft, that real art comes into being. So much contemporary poetry lacks substance precisely to the extent that it stays in the intellect and ignores the passions, that it is not poetry of the soma, of the whole body. Other poetries, unfettered and cloven-hoofed, march across the dreamscape and send shivers up the playground. Those are the poetries I feel aligned to, allied with, attuned to. Images and sounds and movements that rise irrationally from those parts of the self neither intellectual nor rational.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.
—George Mackay Brown, poet

Architecture unfetters us as well. A beautiful building breathes with light and air, it brings us into the space it defines as a living thing. The deliberate geometry of a pure space opens the heart as well as the mind. Years ago, when I was studying modern dance, we went out as a class from the mirrored classroom to the open courtyard of a modern building on campus, and danced there. Passersby stared, most not stopping. There was no music, other than the sounds of hands and feet slapping the concrete of floor and walls, the wind, the distant traffic sounds. But I was filled with sound, just filled with it. As we continued, for several silent connected minutes, a few walkers did stop to watch and become part of the landscape. And then we were done, the late afternoon sun was warm, and we went back, aglow with the pleasure of the dance. It was a moment when we lived the saying "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture;" having done the latter, I feel just fine when doing the former.

So, the tissue of experience made into art, poetry, music, dance, is all of these. It is one seamless fabric, not a series of separate, discrete, rational little envelopes. We are all of a piece, all one fabric, one force.

Oh God, save me from being profound! Save me from those who are carefully literary!
—James Broughton, poet, filmmaker, all around wizard

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 3

10. Don't give in to the tendency to describe your own work as the end-product of an evolutionary process.

There is often a tendency in critical essays that describe artistic progression or aesthetic development to arrive, in the end, at the -isms and schools the author likes, approves of, and, often enough, is a member of. You see this supremely self-serving tendency in academic overviews of poetry written by professional poets with an agenda to promote. It's always tempting to justify one's own poetry by placing one's artistic ancestors into a linear narrative.

But the study of how people write history has shown us that such narratives are always constructed, like linear narrative fiction. Usually such histories are at least partly subjective, since they are narratives meant to prove a point. History is rarely only about telling a story; there is usually an underlying ideology one can identify by looking at what is presented and what is left out. (A good example of how to perceive this inner agenda can be found in John Gallaher's dissection of a Tony Hoagland essay on poetic history.) The point is that self-serving histories cannot be called objective, since they do have an agenda which is not purely to tell a history.

The paradigmatic example of this egotistical progression is those old anthropological diagrams that showed how apes gradually evolved into man. These were accompaniments to densely written tomes describing the evolution of human cultures from primitive hunting and gathering societies to, naturally, the pinnacle of Western civilization. That Western anthropologists would proclaim Western civilization to be the pinnacle of human cultural evolution comes as no surprise, since most such tomes were written during the period of Western colonization of imperial rule over the more "primitive" parts of the globe. Western culture did develop a technical civilization unlike any other, through our ambitious mastery of fire: gunpowder, industrial mechanization, steam, electricity.

It's truly ironic when poets write essays about poetry that echo this pattern of placing oneself and one's poetic peers at the pinnacle of artistic evolution. Most post-avant poetry manifestos do this, in many cases directly echoing the early Modernist poetry manifestos of a century ago.

Poetry is fractured and diverse at this point in history. It seems like every poetic movement and -ism has to justify itself with a manifesto. You have to present your theory before you can present your art. Then and only then can you justify a poetry that no one cares about, that is totally obscurantist, and that only your fellow members of your -ism will read or care about, or respond to.

Placing yourself at the pinnacle of some artistic evolution is a way of constructing a narrative that justifies your art's existence in the face of existential insecurity. If on some level you're anxious about the worth and value of your art (and your self)—and what artist isn't occasionally anxious about their art?—this is a great way of giving yourself a narrative of worth. It's actually rather elitist in spirit.

11. You can't call yourself avant-garde if you're not actually doing anything new or different.

The irony is that post-avant, postmodernist poetry is not an ongoing avant-garde, it is artistic Mannerism. The contemporary post-avant refers constantly to the avant-garde of a century ago to legitimize its perpetual rebellion, even when those rebelling have already become the professional poetry establishment. "All avant-garde all the time" is the motto. The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate and renowned poet, had this to say about avant-gardism:

Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism. . . . I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call "disjunctivitis." The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment "mainstream," to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against "late-capitalist" discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?

As Paz points out, lots of post-avant poets claim to be rebelling against a poetic establishment which doesn't really exist. Lots of straw-men as set up to be knocked over, but they're set as myths that don't actually reflect the true nature of things. There isn't anything to actually rebel against, so a narrative of rebellion has to be constructed, usually via manifesto, laying out a narrative of oppression that justifies generating one's own avant-garde.

As I have said before, postmodernism is really Late High Modernism. It's not really anything new; it's at best something that comes after. If it were really new, postmodernism wouldn't need to include "Modernism" in its very name. So it is a reactive -ism, not a genuinely new alternative. It is in fact the decadent, mannerist end-point of the Modernist ideal that began in the arts a century ago.

There was a genuine avant-garde a century ago, creating new kinds of poetry, aesthetic theory, and artistic expression which actually were rebelling against 50 or 100 years of enforced artistic stagnation. Post-avant poets nowadays insist on their innovative status, but in fact they're still rebelling against the phantoms of fixed forms that were first rebelled against by the genuine avant-garde of a century ago.

it's hilarious nowadays to hear post-avant manifestos use Marxist and Freudian ideologies to justify their reasoning, since Marx and Freud have long since passed into the history of ideas as no longer descriptive of life as we actually live it and know it nowadays. Marxist theory in the arts is doubly hilarious because, as Paz says, there is no proletariat supporting the post-avant's artistic uprising. Power to the people? The "people" are mostly ignoring you, or yawning.

Which of course is the root of anxiety that one's art might in truth be irrelevant. Which leads to the fictive histories mentioned above, which generates manifestos to justify one's avant-gardism, and which also leads to the formation (via those manifestos) of cliques and elites within poetic -isms.

An absurd aspect of poetic avant-gardism is its conformity. A lot of post-avant manifestos praise individualism and uniqueness as elements of their forever-rebellion, but in fact a lot of the members of any given -ism tend to all sound alike. They experiment in the same ways on the same materials. You get a lot of variations on a theme, rather than a genuinely new theme.

In order to make a poem sound hip, for example, a lot of pop culture references get included to make the poem sound contemporary and relevant. This often ends up sounding like name-dropping and product-placement. Frank O'Hara could pull this method off, but many of his followers cannot. Conformity is symptomatic of followers and disciples trying to imitate a master's style, and not being able to grasp the master's intent from the inside. This is largely because their hearts aren't in it, only their minds: there is no original impulse driving the content, only an imitation of form and means. They end up imitating the surface elements of the style, without grasping the original impulse that generated the style.

This is surprisingly true of many contemporary haiku poets, who imitate the japanese haiku masters without really feeling the poetic impulse from the inside. It is particularly noticeable among imitators of Buson, rather than Basho.

12. There is a genuinely new art happening, but it doesn't appear on the radar very often.

Or maybe it's a really old art, with an old set of values, trying to re be restored and re-integrated with what we've learned from the new art.

Usually genuinely new art, and new approaches to art-making, happens under the radar for a long time before anyone notices them. People quietly experiment, play with their materials, and discover something new. Sometimes it happens when familiar things are put together in a new way, generating a new viewpoint or way of thinking about them.

A century ago in literature, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein (and a few others) took the familiar forms of linear-narrative fiction and found new ways of forming them. Some of those forms were non-linear, others were means to go deeper into narrative, or to explore psychological realism without much actual plot happening. This was both a completely new way of thinking about narrative, and a new way of expressing time.

That these new ways of performing narrative remain controversial, and still somewhat below the radar, says not much about the value of experimental literature per se, but it does say a great deal about the context and environment in which these experiments are undertaken.

It doesn't really matter that Joyce, Woolf, and Stein didn't overturn the novel, or forever change the ways in which fiction is written and read. In truth, most readers still like to read a straightforward linear narrative: story narrative is still king. (What this says about general mob psychology can be described on the symbolic, archetypal level by acknowledging that the rate of cultural change is usually only as rapid as its slowest members can sustain. The tribe is inherently conservative, as it carries a lot of inertia.) It doesn't really matter if literary experiments didn't become the new mainstream: experiments are not always meant to replace anything. They were experiments, a word that implies questing, researching, exploring, and trying new solutions, and doesn't exclude the possibility of failure. Call this Modernist avant-garde the experimental science of literature in the early 20th Century.

What Octavio Paz calls "disjunctivitis" in poetry began with the Symbolists, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, their peers and their forebears. When free verse and the prose-poem were first introduced, they were below the poetry mainstream's radar, and stayed there for some time. Then came the simultaneous discovery, acrimony, and plaudits. From these roots we ended up post-avant language-based poetry that disconnects the words on the page from all referent to the real world, or to the inner universe of consciousness.

I see hints, now and then, of the return of several things to poetry, which remain under the radar partly because they would be dismissed out of hand by the new post-avant mandarins of literary fashion, who are themselves become the new establishment. Elements of this eternal return include:

• deep psychology, by which I mean an archetypal psychology, Jung rather than Freud, which is a transpersonal and affirming psychology, rather than the current fashion for dysfunctional psychology manifest as confessional poetry (which is always confessions about the bad stuff in life, you might have noticed), or as acedia poetry that is disassociative from the soma, and from other aspects of psychology.

• a renewed emphasis on words as transparent carriers of meaning, rather than being ends in themselves. The experiment of Language Poetry, still dominant in critical circles, is beginning to fade in practice, if not yet in theory.

• poetry that is in the lineage of Rilke's Thing-poetry; of Lorca's duende and mining of the strata of existence that also generates Surrealism; and of Robert Bly's formulation of "leaping poetry," which he describes as poetry that "leaps" from the conscious, cerebral, intellectual mind suddenly into the subconscious, archetypal, shamanic, mythic mind, and thereby gains power and resonance.

With this last point, I am perhaps committing the sin of placing myself at the end of an evolutionary chain, since this lineage of poetry—Rilke, Lorca, et al.—is one I feel I belong to, if only as a distant descendant with no real claim to any substantive inheritance. It is the type of poetry happening with some poets, again mostly below the radar, that I feel kinship with. This cluster includes several of the West Coast poets such Jeffers, Snyder, Everson, and others such as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, jane Hirshfield, et al. And other poets who I've run across, whose books carry a definite mythopoetic charge, most of whom are relatively unknown, and are definitely under-recognized in the professional poetry world of MFA programs and academic criticism. (If anyone's interested, I'll compile a list from within my personal poetry library at some point, when I have a significant chunk of time.)

Nonetheless, I feel this revival of the archaic, the archetypal, the "primitive," is creating a genuine revival of soul in some contemporary poets' work. I can connect this to several similar upwellings of the old powers that are seeking to integrate with the new, to create something that will live and endure. At root, this poetry seeks to re-enliven contemporary poetry, and cure it of its overwhelming acedia.

The keyword here is integration.

There are parallel developments happening in philosophy, in which some younger thinkers are trying to restore to philosophy its interest in ethics and soul, as well as in pure reason. At the end of the Medieval period, in the Western history of ideas, at the beginning of Renaissance and continuing into the 17th C. Enlightenment period, myth and superstition gave way to reason, the scientific method of experimental observation, and ultimately to the logical-positivist, materialist worldview. This led to the development and triumph of a technological, instrumentality-based civilization. But now, three hundred years later, there is a desire to re-enchant the world that science and philosophical reasoning have disenchanted, have divorced from body and soul. There is concern that technology divorced from ethics produces catastrophe, manifest as environmental degradation, overpopulation pressure, and even nuclear holocaust. There are now philosophers and scientists seeking to restore soul to reason, and to integrate them into a synergistic, greater whole. And there are scientists trying to do the same, from the opposite direction.

In poetry, a parallel revival and integration of the mythic, epic, bardic/skaldic, and prophetic/vatic modes of poetry is beginning to emerge—more properly, has been emerging for some time, but has largely been dismissed by the mandarins of postmodernist mannerism—to stand alongside the currently dominant poetic modes of the personal (post-confessional, narcissistic) lyric, the language-oriented word-play-based "clever" poem, the didactic/philosophical poem, and the prevalent "workshop" poem (usually some small observational slice-of-life irrelevant to anyone but the poet and her friends).

So there is hope for the future of poetry. Really, there never was any doubt. It's a basic law of art and psychology alike that whatever is discarded or repressed will eventually return from the shadows in a new form.

•

Previous entries in this series:

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 2

Fair Warning

I find myself constantly in the felgercarb these days for speaking my mind.

People want the old complacent, quiet me back, I suppose. They'd welcome a return to the old moderate, not-too-showily-liberal, not-too-openly-gay me. What is it about you that makes people uncomfortable? I can tell you in exquisite detail what it is about myself that seems to make some folks uncomfortable.

Well, fair warning: Life's too short to do anything but live it to the hilt. I've had too many recent brushes with mortality to feel like editing my statements just to make others happy, or to conform to their ideas of keeping the peace.

This attitude is indeed a change on my behalf; I acknowledge that.

What's new and different about me is that I no longer care to edit myself just to make you happy.

Several long-time interlocutors and correspondents seem to be having a problem with that. Well, they just need to get over it. Life is way too short.

There's an element to this, too, of a renewed activism on my part: an anti-bullying activism. It's amazing how subtle it can be. The great philosopher Max Headroom once opined: Asking is only polite demanding. While that was said for humor's sake, there's an element of truth in it. Many people choose to frame their demands in the politest of terms—thus is born diplomacy. While no professional diplomat would rise to the bait in a burst of outrage, in fact the art of diplomacy is designed to phrase such ardor in mainly non-confrontational terms. But the ardor is not absent; it's just subsumed. Diplomacy is polite, verbal sparring that is meant to deflect actual, physical sparring.

My renewed activism against bullying is based not only in tragic, ongoing, exemplary recent events—such tragedies are always ongoing, but the media don't report on them until horrid situations reach a certain critical mass—but on long-contemplated thoughts about my own history of having been bullied. I've written extensive, controversial essays about that, and posted them here. (Just click on the label "bullying" after this post.) Some—"commentators" is too tame a word for their vitriol—have gone so far as to claim that the truth of my experience was fiction, that I was lying. How sad for them to discover, eventually, that they are wrong.

One tactic bullies use, of course, is to deny that they are bullying anyone. So they must vehemently deny the truth of anyone's experience who in fact was bullied.

You see this form of negative attack in the media reports about bullying, too: the deniers who insist it all meant nothing; that there was no connection between political hate speech and political violence; that bullying a kid for being gay, or merely being assumed to be gay, had no connection to their poor self-esteem and/or suicide attempts. Some of which eventually succeed. These deniers demonstrate their prejudice by their disconnected illogic: their alternate narratives rarely stand up to the philosophical test of simplest explanation generally being the true one (Occam's Razor).

I've taken on a lot of philosophical and literary bullies lately, mostly with the result that I've gotten banned from supping at their tables. Which I find fascinating: Anyone who would ban you for disagreeing with them, and being able to back it up, is basically banning you because on some level they know their own arguments can't hold water, and they don't really want an open discussion about their topic. An actual, open discussion about their topic could shockingly prove them wrong.

How did I take on those bullies? Simply by speaking my truth, i.e. the truth of my experience and knowledge acquired by experience and research—which happened to be different than theirs. My sin was quite unintentional. I just spoke what I knew to be the truth of my own experience—which was different from theirs. Substantially, demonstrably different. That's enough to get you demonized, in some circles.

One of the most pernicious arguments that intellectual bullies will try to perpetrate on you is that there is no difference between X and Y when in fact the difference between X and Y is precisely what drives dissent. It's like the old folktale about the Devil trying to convince you that he doesn't exist—and bullies don't actually bully anybody. Uh huh.

How did I learn what things I say that make people uncomfortable? You acquire that data by walking quite unintentionally into the minefields that you didn't know were there. If you pay attention, it's not hard to notice when peoples' buttons are getting pushed, whether you intended to or not. Most people don't live their lives consciously—they don't even know their own minds very well, nor their own prejudices. Count yourself blessed, and far ahead of the pack, if you do.

How can you spot such prejudices? It's very simple: They don't hold up to even basic logic or reason.

Not that reason is the end of all arguments—the mind can't do a thing to help the soul, in the end, when the soul is in trouble. And you can't think your way out of a problem you got into by using the same thinking that got you into the problem in the first place.

But the illogic used in covert prejudice, especially by those who would deny they harbor any such prejudices, is usually glaring. It's not even self-consistent. The mark of emotion overruling logic is that logic, simply, fails.

This is, again, not to valorize logic over emotion; it is merely to point out that we are innately emotional creatures, and that logic is a learned discipline that requires immense self-awareness to maintain.

Actually I have no problem with honest prejudice. if somebody honestly, openly tells me what they like and don't like, I'm fine with that. We might disagree, but I respect their integrity for being honest with me. It's fine, for example, if you don't like my poetry and music, and never will. But don't make the illogical leap to say something like, my poetry is bad, simply because you don't like it. Your taste is no more infallible than mine. (Although mine might be more flexible than yours, although I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Again, that's just experience talking.)

Those who claim objectivity are, in my experience, often those with the most deeply-buried, unaware prejudices.

Those literary critics who like to make Grand Pronouncements about literary matters (Harold Bloom, Yvor Winters, James Woods, etc.) are often the most unwilling to admit to their own biases—yet those biases are transparent to any close reader who pays attention to both what is being said and what is being dismissed out-of-hand. While it's perfectly possible to say "this is bad writing, clumsy and artificial and poorly executed," it's not possible to say much more than that. Critics who dismiss the entire body of work of certain writers, merely because they were "genre" writers, have their heads up their fundaments. Yet that is precisely what those same Critics who like to make Grand Pronouncements often do.

How sad for them to discover, eventually, that they are wrong.

Of course, like bullies, they can never admit to being wrong. Which is also sad.

Here's the logic of evolution: In order to evolve, you have to admit to past errors. You have to have the backbone to say: Oops, I blew it! I was wrong! You have to be comfortable with being uncertain and imperfect. You have to be willing to disarm your weapons, put them away, and live with the truth that you were wrong.

This is something bullies are usually unable to do. Admitting you're wrong is like admitting you're a bad person: the self-worth is conflated with the error. So it becomes impossible to admit you were wrong because if you do you're also saying you're a bad person. You see how emotion trumps logic? There is no logical reason why people should ever not make mistakes: we're limited, we're imperfect, and we don't know everything. Logically, self-esteem and being factually wrong in word or action have no connection. But they get tangled up, and emotion trumps logic again. Oops!

I'll tell you why I believe book reviewers are usually better than those Great Book Critics at doing their jobs: They give you an honest response, which you're free to disagree with, but which might help you to decide if you want to read the book in question, or not. Most reviewers keep ann open mind, and don't have an ideological axe to grind. The mark of a dishonest critic is that the do have an ideological axe to grind, and try to convince you that they do not. I have never had anything but distaste for such dishonesty; what's new and different about me, now, is that I'm not stopping myself from saying so.

I'm using literary criticism here as an example of a pattern one can identify in many arena of discourse. In fact, literary criticism is no worse or better, in its prejudices, than any other arena of discourse. It does tend to be more verbally vicious than some, however—perhaps because after all it is an arena built of words; or perhaps because there is in the end very little at stake, compared to other arena of discourse. (For example, diplomacy.)

The basic point I'm making here is that I no longer subscribe to the idea that words have no power to harm or hurt. Of course they do. They always did. Life's too short, I've discovered, to pretend otherwise.

On another level of reality, of course, words have no power whatsoever—at least that's the usual opinion in our own culture, where, unlike in some other cultures, we don't throw poets in jail for political dissent. At least those dictatorships that jail poets for dissent demonstrate that they actually do believe in the power of words to change the world. In our culture, we are far more insidious in our distaste for free speech: we treat dissent with indifference. We treat poets as useless. We label the arts as unnecessary to the wellbeing of individuals. We have chosen a far more damaging path: we have decided that words have no power, that they are beside the point. And since, in the world made of words, what you say is what becomes true (belief creates reality), therefore it is so: words have no power.

But that's not true.

The bullies and the deniers will tell you that words have no power to change the world. The political commentators who are invested in the nastiest forms of verbal abuse and hate speech disguised as everyday discourse will tell you that their commentaries don't influence the actions of those who commit hate crimes. The people who ban you from their table for dissenting with their opinions, who know deep inside that their opinions are baseless, will tell you that they are themselves free speech advocates.

How sad for them to discover, eventually, that they are wrong.

The Dark Night

I am prompted to write by a brilliant commentary on the dark of the soul and the new atheists by the Maverick Philosopher. (Hat tip to Frank Wilson for the link.)

The Maverick Philosopher's short article takes on professional gadfly and contrarian, Christopher HItchens, one of the loudest voices of the so-called New Atheism:

Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.

Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

Hitchens is also, right now, dealing with esophageal cancer, a life-threatening illness with a low survival rate, despite chemotherapy, radiation treatment, etc. I've known other people dealing with esophageal cancer, and it very much depends on when they catch it, and if they are able to remove all the affected tissue.

No one expects Hitchens to have a religious conversion due to his illness, and no one expects him to be anything but continuously contrarian. I for one would never require any person to have a religious conversion, nor would I require them to change themselves in any way contrary to their nature. Nonetheless, serious illness promotes change. We have two usual responses to serious, life-threatening illness: one is to resist mightily and fight hard to retain our identity; the other is to give in to the process, float along with the changes, and emerge as a pilgrim on the other side, one who has undertaken the journey and emerged changed. As a natural part-time Taoist I tend to go with the flow, but there are times when I also fight hard to retain some sense of the self that I used to be.

However, just this morning an artist friend of mine sent me a quote relevant to her upcoming New York gallery show, on the topic of pilgrimage:

Only the walker who sets out toward ultimate things is a pilgrim. In this lies the difference between tourist and pilgrim. The tourist travels just as far, sometimes with great zeal and courage, gathering up acquisitions and returns the same person as the one who departed. The pilgrim resolves that the one who returns will not be the same person as the one who set out. The pilgrim must be prepared to shed the husk of personality or even the body like a worn out coat. For the pilgrim the road is home; reaching the destination seems nearly inconsequential.
—Andrew Schelling, poet and scholar, from the anthology Meeting the Buddha, edited by Molly Emma Aitken

It's hard not to view my last few years as a pilgrimage. This chromic illness that I have waded into full-body has elements of pilgrimage. I resist the New Age cliché that all experiences are teaching experiences, because that is too glib, as usual; nonetheless there have been lessons learned from my illness that are life-lessons, that have utterly changed the way I perceive the world, and my relationships. Many insubstantial relationships have fallen by the wayside, leaving me often alone, and just as often embraced within the circle of my closest friends. You know, those real friends who are there for you no matter what, and you return the favor.

I set out on each longer roadtrip, those trips of a month or more, with the hope of pilgrimage: the hope of returning changed. So far, so good. My last roadtrip out to the winter mountains and the stormy winter Pacific Ocean did accomplish this ambition, at least in part. You cannot expect your life to utterly change, when you go away and return: you also have to integrate the new experiences, somehow, into your returned, existing life. Re-entry to that normative life within the normative social order can be relatively painful, the more you have changed during a journey, the intense the pilgrimage has been, and sometimes the urge to just stay on the road and never go home seems unbearable. And when on a longer roadtrip I do function as a pilgrim, as Schelling says, when reaching the destination seems nearly inconsequential. I never feel freer than when I drive only so far in a day, and stop early, make camp in a state or national park, wander about seeing the sites, then make a meal slow-cooked over woodfire or the Coleman stove under the stars. I do some of my best thinking during those long drives. I sometimes settle life-long issues in heart and mind. More often, I find my own inner philosopher, the part of me who is able to articulate, often in poetry or essay, what most matters to my life. And I make dozens or hundreds of photos; the process of sorting might not begin till months after I return, but the process of making fresh images of favorite scenes, under the changing light, is itself a reward, itself a kind of pilgrimage.

And so I return to the Maverick Philosopher's point about sensibilities, aesthetic, philosophical, and religious: It is obvious that an aesthetic sensibility is in play when I'm out on the road, making photographs. I have had friends and other photographers question me, while watching me at work, about my working methods. My method is to look a long time before raising the camera to my eye and making a single image. I watch the light change till it's just perfect. A lot of my best photographs were made by being in the right place at the right time—often when no one else was around. Several good photographers looking at the same scene will often make very different images, since each sees through his or her own eye and experience and desire. This has been made obvious every time I've taught a photography class, and I do encourage it when teaching: the group scatters on location, and almost no one duplicates an image by another.

Nonetheless, I am often questioned as to why I don't make more images than I do, on location, and why I often contemplate a scene in nature for a long time before making an image. The answer I give in the moment is usually that I'm waiting for the right moment, waiting for the light. And while that's true, it's also true that I am waiting for my heart and soul to quiet and become still, as reflective as a still mountain pool reflecting the moon. I am waiting for my inner stillness to reflect the scene before me. At that point, I'm ready to get to work, because making a photograph for me is not about "artistic self-expression," it's about reflecting and responding to what is already there. This process has little place for egotism. I am often waiting, when I wait, for my ego to dissolve into some larger vessel, so that it doesn't get in the way of making the photograph. It's not that the "I" completely goes away—one still has to retain enough "I" to manage one's camera, and to be aware of where the trail approaches the cliff—it's that the "I" doesn't dominate the aesthetic experience, the artistic process.

With regard to the religious sensibility, which I must point out overlaps significantly with the aesthetic sensibility, at least for many artists and musicians of my acquaintance, as well as for myself, the Maverick Philosopher continues with the meat of his commentary:

Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that [Mother] Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.

I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing it.

The reason this makes so much sense to me is that the Maverick Philosopher has put his finger on the experience of the dark night, and why it's not a merely intellectual or moral choice. It often strikes me that the New Atheists have no sense of life whatsoever beyond the intellectual. Do they ever actually stop to appreciate a sunset? Perhaps, but they never write about it (except to negatively claim that their enjoyment of a sunset didn't require God's presence), so there's no evidence of it.

Let me be clear: I have no use for most of organized religion. I am a person who has had numerous mystical experiences, including the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul. I have no more use for the organized Christian church than do the New Atheists. Where we differ is that I do have a religious sensibility, and have had mystical experiences. We also differ in that I don't attempt to explain away my experiences as mere brain chemistry, or with merely intellectual rhetoric. The Maverick Philosopher is quite correct that the New Atheists seem unable to even comprehend mysticism, even accept it as an existential possibility, and so they must do their best to denigrate it.

In the year 1990, for several years, I was lost in what St. John of the Cross termed the dark night of the senses. The religious sensibility was taken away from me. Everything I had ever believed, every idea or belief I had had about my personal spirituality and connection to the Divine, was removed from my sight. Everything was hollow, meaningless, pointless. I was terrified of the emptiness. I had had my first real vision of the Void, and I could hear its emptiness continuously, in every waking and sleeping moment, for about four years. I couldn't find belief, much less faith, anywhere. Everything crumbled as soon as I touched it. Every tenet became provisional. Nothing had any substance, any reasonable verity. it was all hollow and blank. You could try on a belief system, but it was exactly like trying on a coat: something you could shrug off again all too easily. During those years, I did indeed throw a lot of paint at the wall of spiritual practice and belief—but nothing stuck.

I continued to have what some would call visions, what others would call waking dreams, but which are so normal to me that just call them "Oh, you again." It was during this period that I realized the full truth of what Rilke wrote about in his Duino Elegies: that Every angel is terrifying. So one could say the messengers, the intermediaries, the animal spirits, the angels, were still tapping me on the shoulder. But nothing they had to say meant anything. At least not then.

And then it was over. About four years after my first vision of the Void, I had a second, even more powerful Vision of the void, which was curative and healing. It was the moment of Letting Go. Even though meaning did not suddenly flood back into the world, even though tenets and dogmas have remained always provisional, suddenly I was at peace. It didn't matter anymore what I or anyone else believed. It didn't even matter if they believed in anything. I had re-found, or more accurately I had been re-gifted, my own center. My tenets to this day do not require anyone to share them, nor even for anyone to believe in them, or in anything I have to say on the topic.

The great science fiction writer and philosopher Erik Frank Russell once defined our fundamental basic right as: "Every man has the basic right to go to hell in his own way." My approach to that tenet, which I largely agree with, is to have become ever less willing to intervene in anyone else's progress or process. Non-intervention. The Prime Directive. Individual destiny. Whatever you want to label it.

At the same time, my capacity for empathizing with the suffering of others, my capacity for compassion, was deepened by the visions of the Void, by my experience of the dark night of the senses. I am politically as well as naturally Taoist, yet the Vow of the Bodhisattva means a great deal to me: I vow to put off my own escape into nirvana until I have been able to assist in the enlightenment of all other sentient beings. In practical terms, this means you have to stand by while others fail, but bear witness to their lives, and be there to offer help if they ask for it. Some will never ask for help.

Have you ever noticed how so many of the New Atheists commit the sin of pride, if only by their extreme lack of humility in their opinion that they're right and everyone else is wrong? The New Atheists are as convinced of the rightness of their beliefs as are many religious fundamentalists; indeed the psychological parallels are noteworthy. (cf. Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for more on the psychology of political and philosophical fundamentalism) A genuine commitment to the truth cannot be hampered by ideological prejudice. You have to be open-minded enough to admit that you might be wrong. That's something I can't imagine Christopher Hitchens ever admitting, not even on his probable deathbed. His utter certainty about the verity of his own opinions leaves no tenet unprovisional. It is this very smug self-certainty that undermines everything the New Atheists have to say that I might otherwise agree with; after all, their critique of organized religion has some very valid points, some very harsh but true criticisms of the evils that organized religion has perpetrated on humanity. But in their utter certainty that religious belief itself is the cause of all this evil, and their total lack of religious sensibility, the New Atheists succeed in undermining themselves, and in the end convincing no one. (Except each other—which is one psychological characteristic equally shared by high school cliques and ideological cults.)

By contrast, even now, every tenet I hold remains provisional. This is the truth of mysticism: that unknowing is as important and valuable as knowing. After experiencing the dark night, I can never have total certainty again about any idea or belief. There remain a few certainties that I hold as valid and true, even if I might sometimes myself question them: That everything will die; that resisting entropy is nonetheless worth the fight; that I can discover beauty in almost anything if I look long enough; that there deep inside me, when you strip everything else away, something unbreakable, undefeatable, indestructible. During even my worst days and nights, when I'm ready to give up because I just can't take it anymore, I remember that despite all the times I might have died, I'm still here. I'm still here.

In 2004 I moved to New Mexico to live for six months in the desert outside Taos. I was lost again. I had hit a career dead end, and stagnation. I was laid off just before 9/11 and like the economy itself, I had never really recovered. So I pulled up stakes in the Midwest and tried to start over again in a new place. But this was the beginning of the period of my life, still ongoing, when things, no matter what I tried to do, seemed to only get worse.

In the desert of New Mexico, for six months, I experienced the dark night of the soul full force. Actually it lasted longer than that, in fact it's been revisiting me this past year of major illness, but my desert sojourn is a convenient marker for those who need bookends to every experience. The Presence of the Divine was withdrawn from my cognition. make no mistake: I have no use for the word "God" precisely because we all use it thinking it means the same thing when it never does; so it's a label I avoid. My desert dark night experience taught me that the truest, most potent name for the divine, at least for me, is Mystery. I thrive on the Unknowing, on not-knowing the true nature and depth of the divine. My tenets all remain provisional. It is not that I tolerate and put up with not having all the answers, it's rather that I actively and passionately embrace not having all the answers. My life's experience has given me many answers to specific situations, always somewhat provisional of course, that I find myself repeating when asked for them by someone I'm teaching or mentoring or discussing life with. But the last thing I'll claim is certainty that I have all the answers. I know that I do not, and never will, at least not while I still inhabit this flesh. Paradoxically, I suppose, I am certain that my certainty has severe limits.

How can you go through life not knowing all the answers?

An indirect yet very necessary response to that question is to point out that the idea that one can know all the answers is an intellectual, rational, logical-positivist idea, one which contains its own assumptions and ideological baggage. The New Atheists, many of whom are renowned scientists, seem unable to comprehend that their own position is an ideological position, and not representative of the way science is actually practiced: that is, experimentally and provisionally.

I trained in science from a young age and all through my college years. As a result, I am not likely to agree with the committed religious that science is the enemy, because they too misrepresent what science actually is: a method of study of the natural world that is based on observation and provisional questioning.

From my viewpoint, which is a mystic's viewpoint, both the New Atheists and the religious zealots who are their most profound mirrors, are wrong, and wrong-headed. Both of these opposing camps are certain of their own tenets. Both camps are sure they possess the truth, and no one else does. This accounts for their equal zeal in trying to convert others to their way of thinking—as well as their intolerance for internal dissent amongst their rank and file. Again, the psychology of each camp seems mirrored in the other.

A second response to the question, How can you go through life not knowing all the answers?, lies in the tenet that many spiritual traditions hold: That one must learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Even, with practice, to make uncertainty into a positive value, not merely something one tolerates because one must. This is the way of Unknowing. It turns up as a mystic's wisdom expressed in all the world's major religions; it is as often expressed in Tibetan Buddhism as it is by the Medieval Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa of Avila. The wisdom of uncertainty lies at the very root of Taoism, and therefore of Zen Buddhism, which is a blending of tenets that occurred when Indian Buddhism was brought to Confucian and Taoist China centuries past.

So it seems to me that one of the aspects of religious sensibility that the intellect-based New Atheists such as Hitchens cannot seem to ever comprehend is this very truth of Unknowing. Once again, they dismiss it as a merely intellectual belief. "Of course we can eventually know everything! That's the magic of human consciousness!" This intellectual certainty of the New Atheists' response to the tenet of uncertainty seems like an almost allergic reaction: an instant denial that is more knee-jerk than thoughtful, exactly like you how can't help sneezing when hay fever strikes.

One the chief lessons of the dark night of the soul is that one must become comfortable with uncertainty. There really is no choice. It's one of the profound lessons of the experience: because you don't know what's going on, or why, you are forced to accept that you may never know what's going on, and may never know why. When you're in the dark night, it's impossible to see the exit. There is no exit. There is only the dark night. It is a self-contained experience, and it takes place inside a container with no doors, no windows.

Eventually, someday, a little light comes in. I knew that I had begun to emerge from the dark night, or at least from that period of the dark night, when it didn't matter to me anymore that I couldn't feel the divine presence anymore. All I could perceive was Mystery, and that was as it should be. The dark night is key to the mystical path of the via negative, the Negative Way, which is the Way of Letting Go, the Way of Unknowing. You have to learn to trust and surrender to the experience of the darkness itself. This is a profoundly non-intellectual experience, because if there is one thing the ego and the intellect have difficulty doing, it's surrender and trust. In the dark night you discover that "trust" and "surrender" and "faith" are all the same thing: just different labels for the same attitude, the same feeling, the same groping, the same experience. I still struggle with this. It's hard for me to trust that "All shall be well again" one those days when the only truth I can confront with certainty is that "pain hurts." This isn't a matter of belief. It's a matter of the religious sensibility.

For myself, one way I have managed to survive the dark night is by discovering that for me, as for many other artists and musicians, the aesthetic sensibility and the religious sensibility overlap to a great extent. My practice of faith is in my art-making, in my music. Johann Sebastian Bach signed every one of his musical manuscripts, Deo gratias, "To the glory of God." I don't have a relationship with the straightforward Christian God, even though like Bach I was raised in and participated in the Lutheran church. It's not that I had an atheistic conversion and left the Lutheran church in a huff of annoyed resentment, it's rather than I outgrew the tenets I had been raised with. The version of the Lutheran church that I was raised in was a very rational church—miracles only happened in the Biblical era, and in our contemporary world they had no more existence. So what was the Lutheran church to do with a boy who started having visions of angels and other worlds from the age of five? I hold no resentment, and I held no resentment back then; rather, I think I just outgrew the Lutherans. By the time I had my first vision of the Void, and the dark night of the senses that followed, I had long since moved on.

(The only point of resentment and distrust between myself and the church I was raised in centered on the issue of my homosexuality. I don't want to make that big a deal out of this. I was not cast out or dramatically condemned the way so many other gay men were; I don't carry those anti-Christian wounds that many gay men suffer for decades after being vilified and ejected from their home churches. My Lutherans were far too rational and liberal-minded for that sort of casting-out and hatred. They were at most just uncomfortable and perturbed. I did leave the church in part, it's true, because I was gay, and felt I had no place there anymore; that was part of my coming out process, as for many other gay and bisexual men. But again I don't want to make it into more than it was. The deeper reason I left was because I had outgrown it. There was no rejection, but rather a realization on my part that I would never really fit in. It was also about my lack of interest in group worship, as opposed to solitary spiritual practice, my preferred mode. About twelve years after I had left my church, I first started seriously reading Thomas Merton, the contemporary writer and mystic. It was through Merton's mysticism and example and writings that I found my way to accepting that the Christian church was not all bad, in fact it had some good aspects. Merton was my path to genuine acceptance, and perhaps forgiveness. I remain unaffiliated with any organized religion, and I remain a maverick, fitting poorly into group worship situations, preferring to follow my own idiosyncratic path wherever the visions have led.)

So for me, making music, making art, making poems, is very much akin to a religious practice. It is a daily practice: I make something every day, even though I don't write a poem every day, or record a piece of music every day. I know a lot of the musicians I work with would agree that most of their spiritual awareness and experience goes into their music. Few of them would frame this using any variety of religious language. Most of them would squirm at the very idea. But some would agree with me that the aesthetic experience and the religious experience are sometimes indistinguishable. One or two might even frame the overlap between the aesthetic and the religious as I have here.

Pity the poor atheists, who have nothing in them that allows them to partake of the aesthetic sensibility, the religious sensibility, or the philosophical sensibility. I express neither judgmentalism nor pity when I say that I would find such a life hellishly empty and excruciatingly hollow, devoid of even a sense of sacredness of place, or of the solace of art-making.

Contradictions & Paradoxes & Not

There is no argument between "religion" and "science." The argument is on the level of appearances, the insistence that one's own relativistic observer's viewpoint is the only valid observer's viewpoint. The argument of "science" (which is nothing more than a method of inquiry that leads to a practical body of descriptive knowledge) against "religion" is that religion is superstitious, unnecessary, and delusional. The argument of "religion" (which is nothing more than a method of inquiry that leads to a cloud of unknowing of which faith is proof) against "science" is that science is heartless, faithless, unethical, and detached from moral direction and social consequence.

Both viewpoints are true.

Both viewpoints are also incomplete and inaccurate, based on mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

My personal, practical mysticism is grounded in, and confirmed by, theoretical physics. I am not alone in this.

But even theoretical physics is often considered heresy by mainstream physics. People don't like to have their cherished assumptions about the nature of reality questioned. This is as true for some scientists as it is for some religious. Both religious and physicists sometimes contort their ideologies into ridiculous pretzels merely to preserve the cherished assumption of causality (which is the assumption that all causes must precede effects, therefore that time is linear and unidirectional). Paradoxes, which can be miraculous, are no more accepted by standard (theological) religious logic than by the logic of classical (Newtonian) physics.

And yet miracles do happen.

The bottom line in deciphering an explanation of an event is to ask if it is necessary to invoke an outsider cause to explain an effect. In terms of theoretical physics, which contains some interpretations in which time can move in any direction and is focused, as it were, on physical objects (mass bends space and time) in a Gaussian distribution, miracles are inevitable. Cause does not always have to precede effect; effect can precede cause, from one observer's viewpoint, while from another observer's viewpoint, causality is preserved. Miracles can happen.

The religious observer's viewpoint invokes God, an outsider operator, to explain miracles. But theoretical physics argues that no such explanation is necessary and sufficient. It is not necessary to invoke God under normal physical operations. A sufficient explanation is available, using the observed laws of physics, to describe observed physical effects. In order to describe and explain the current observed state of the Universe, invoking a Creator is not necessary. This in a nutshell is the physicist observer's viewpoint.

Yet the wise physicist will point out that "necessary and sufficient" does not mean "impossible." in other words, it is not necessary to invoke God to explain human consciousness, but this does not "prove" that God doesn't exist. Scientists make this logical mistake as often as religious do. "Necessary and sufficient" to explain a physical phenomenon says nothing about faith or proof of faith—although some anti-religious scientists (such as the militant atheists) try to make it do so. But they cannot explain away the aesthetic experience of "beauty" either. And "truth" has a very limited definition within scientific experimental practice, in which a proof can be true only within specifically defined parameters relevant to the experiment. Mathematical proofs are not always true in the real world, in practice. Time can flow in more than one direction. Tachyons do seem to exist, and do seem to have been measured.

Neither classical physics or standard quantum physics today permits ‘intent’ or ‘free will’ or ‘creative intelligence’. This essential hallmark of life demands a violation of the statistical predictions of quantum physics as formulated today. This is the key idea of what I call ‘postmodern physics.’
—Jack Sarfatti, theoretical physicist

Life cannot be explained purely by causality, because will and intention and choice are involved. We not only have choices about our actions, we have choice about what we believe, and how we perceive the world. Our choices about what we believe filter our perceptions, which in a feedback loop can then also filter our beliefs. We cannot perceive what we do not believe is there; unbelief affects perception as much as belief does. We tend to view the familiar as more beautiful than the unfamiliar; we tend to preserve our habits-of-thought as our cherished assumptions about the nature of reality, and we tend to dislike and deny contradictions to those cherished assumptions. There are people who probably cannot actually have a religious experience, because they've chosen to believe in their impossibility. (Some of these are dedicated churchgoers, as well.)

The goal of meditation practice is, at bottom line, to remove the filters, so that we can perceive what's actually there. Meditation has been measured and studied using scientific operations and instrumentalities; and it has been shown to make actual changes in both biology and consciousness; and some scientists are also meditators.

Is "God" an artificial intelligence, a constructed intelligence? "God made us in his image, and we returned the favor." We project our psychologies so well onto the Universe that the Universe, which is malleable, transmits them back. "God" might be ourselves under magnification. The gods certainly seem to act in very human ways. Perhaps "God" is not necessary to explain physical phenomena, but is necessary nonetheless. Not as a balm for the troubled soul, nor as a superstition (which is what anyone convinced of their own belief system tends to label the conflicting belief systems of others), but as an awareness for the many "anomalous experiences" that people seem to keep having, over the ages, that lie outside explanation. Even scientists have had anomalous experiences, as have many mystics. My personal mysticism (which is based on personal experience, anomalous or otherwise) is not contradicted by theoretical physics, but instead seems to be confirmed by it. Yet many scientists distrust intuition, except when it confirms their own gut feelings. But scientists are human, and therefore subject to the same logical paradoxes as the rest of us. The purpose of the scientific method of experimentation is to remove bias from the experimental outcome: the attempt to see what's really there rather than what we want to believe is there. Skepticism is a positive value. (Of course, any positive value can be flipped to a negative value, if taken to an extreme.)

We won't arrive at final-stage truth by reductionism, the process of breaking processes, objects, and explanations into ever-smaller components and sub-components. Molecular biology and neuroscience have unfortunately lately developed all-too-strong a tendency towards reductionism. One objection to neuroscience that many religious have, and it is a valid objection, is the attempt to explain, or explain away, the mind and soul as wetware components of the brain-as-supercomputer. Having invented the digital computer about a century or so ago, humans now have this tendency to filter all their perceptions of reality through the paradigm of the digital computer. But binary logic, while fantastic for computing, and useful for mathematics, doesn't describe the real world, which is much better described by those still-controversial mathematical/logical tools, fuzzy logic and fractals. The world is not actually Euclidean, although many scientists continue to perceive it that way. The cherished assumptions we make about the nature of reality (life, God, the Universe, and everything) in turn filter how we perceive reality. This only gets us so far, however.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

The reductionist explanation of human consciousness as a software (wetware) derived from and generated by the organic computer of the brain falls short of real-world experience. It is not necessary to invoke human mind and soul in order to explain human behavior, or brain chemistry, but neither is it sufficient to explain all aspects of human consciousness as brain chemistry. The criteria of "necessary AND sufficient" has not been met by contemporary neuroscience in its dominantly mechanistic interpretations. In other words, while it is not necessary to invoke the soul when describing human consciousness, it is not sufficient to merely explain away the soul as a delusion created by brain operations. Real-world experience has documented many cases of anomalous experiences that cannot be explained away by anomalous brain chemistry. The universal human belief in an afterlife, which has been documented via near-death experiences and mystical experiences from many cultures across time, cannot be sufficiently explained away as anomalous brain chemistry. So there is grounds for faith.

So it seems obvious to me, whose real-life experiences have encompassed both rigorous scientific training AND extraordinary metaphysical experiences, that both "science" and "religion" are true, and that the argument between them verges on psychological hysteria, since it is not totally supported by experience. (Denials are not proofs, as proving a negative is beyond the scope of philosophy.) In fact, there is a great deal of overlap between science and religion, as the new physics suggests, and seems to prove, at least some of the time.

What is in conflict between science and religion is differing sets of cherished assumptions about the nature of causality. But both the fearless scientist and the probing mystic, who keep open minds, who are likewise willing to explore avenues of inquiry thought mad by their peers, who are willing to look past the cherished assumptions, to remove the known filters, and attempt to perceive what's really there—both of these might in the end realize that they are not conflict, but rather in some level of deep agreement.