God Can't Be Reconciled

 Via the NYT I came across this: 

Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/books/jurgen-moltmann-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

In which I discovered these:

Well, I recently finished my readings for the Brown German Studies Course: Postcatastrophic Narratives: Memory and Postmemory in German Literature after 1945, and I have some questions.

How does god suffer or mourn without a body? Moreover, if god could mourn and suffer, isn't this all he would do? Does god read the papers? It's a shit show out there of epic (dare I say biblical) proportions. If god had a body with a brain and a limbic system to process emotions, he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Moltmann's god would be depressed and powerless. 

Moltmann, like others from WWII, is trying to process and reconcile god with the world. Different from Adorno ("Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.") who jettisons god, and different from Sebald who can't trust god or memory, tries to anthropomorphize god for a reconciliation but doesn't follow the logic through. 

Putting god in the play makes him a schlub like the rest of us. Putting god in Germany makes him accountable. Giving god a body renders him subject to depression at best and entropy at worst. 

God can't be reconciled. At all. Not with WWII and The Holocaust, not with natural selection, not with entropy. 

 

Dog Food And Truth

I had a truly terrible dream last night.

I had a dream I was taking a German exam and I was unable to prepare for the exam–my ability to memorize got me through undergrad and a scholarship for graduate school (I once got a 100% on a Spinoza exam mostly by memorizing a shit-ton of Spinoza)–so this was terrible for me. 

But, it got worse, the way some dreams do. While taking this awful exam, with pictures I couldn't make sense of and directions I couldn't make sense of, pages out of order, I tried to go up to the front of the class to ask the prof for clarification. But you know dreams, while trying to make my way to the front of the class, I get lost, end up on a crowded sidewalk in a crowded city and almost get hit by a trash truck, only to reach a prof for a previous Marxism class, plus my exam is all out of order and I can't even ask her questions. So I'm trudging back to my German class, exam in hand, fighting the people on the sidewalk and the occasional car up on the sidewalk when, I wake up.

I have dreams of this ilk and they are awful. The feeling resides upon waking. The feeling of being lost and unprepared. I hate to Heidegger this up (do I though? Don't I love Heidegger?) but this feeling of geworfenheit, of being thrown...into the world is truly awful, almost horror...for me.

And I thought about writing upon awaking. And I thought about perhaps my son, asking me why I have these kinds of dreams.

And I thought about explaining to my nine year old Juju that: I'm not satisfied with quaint little stories. Though quaint and cute they may be. I think I have these dreams because I seek accurate explanations.

"But you're a relativist!" I hear from the interlocutor.

Indeed. You have me pegged. 

But my relativism doesn't quell the questioning. This is the crux.

Consider an example:

You're starving. You haven't had a crumb of food in, let us say three weeks, and the only reason you are alive is you've had access to water. Truly starving is my point here. You'll die unless you find something to eat.

You find something to eat.

A can of wet, dog food.

Yes, dog food. It'll keep you alive and sustain you. Perfectly edible, dog food is. 

My relativism is dog food. Can sustain me but it doesn't taste very good and it doesn't go down easily. Different from the quaint, candy-like stories that go down oh so smooth, but rot your teeth.

Truth is relative, per Lakoff and Metaphors We Live By but I am still thrown into this world and I live and move about in the minutiae and the people who thwart my projects (so much Heidegger this guy!) and offend my delicate sensibilities.

The world gives me dog food when I want to order off menu–the Dirty Steak from Al Forno in Providence, after a grilled pizza appetizer, with a single malt to wash it all down.

Dog food.

And relative truth.

"We do not believe that there is such a thing as objective (absolute and unconditional) truth, though it has been a long-standing theme in Western culture that there is. We do believe that there are truths but think that the idea of truth need not be tied to the objectivist view. We believe that the idea that there is absolute objective truth is not only mistaken but socially and politically dangerous. As we have seen, truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor. Most of our metaphors have evolved in our culture over a long period, but many are imposed upon us by people in power—political leaders, religious leaders, business leaders, advertisers, the media, etc. In a culture where the myth of objectivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true—absolutely and objectively true. It is for this reason that we see it as important to give an account of truth that is free of the myth of objectivism (according to which truth is always absolute truth). Since we see truth as based on understanding and see metaphor as a principal vehicle of understanding, we think that an ac-count of how metaphors can be true will reveal the way in which truth depends upon understanding." 

If Memory Serves

No doubt you’ve thought about memory if you’ve read/heard/seen this Senate Judiciary Hearing with Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Ford.

Ford’s memory and the accuracy of it are essential to who believes what. And who believes what matters…a lot. A lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court to determine if laws are constitutional is, a la Ron Burgandy, kind of a bid deal.

But there are those who wonder, like this guy, how she can remember certain things but not others. From 35 some years ago.

This whole thing has me thinking about high school parties and to be honest I don’t recall much. But then again there aren’t really any prompts. I’m sure if I perused my yearbook some memories would emerge.

Bu then again, my high school years and parties didn’t involve trauma.

Now of course trauma is a relative term. But there was nothing like what Ford asserts happened to her – trauma.

But when I think about it. I can remember one thing…similar.

You see there was a guy in our neighborhood; was on the high school football team, big guy, muscular, at least compared to me who didn’t break 100 lbs in the 9th grade…and didn’t life a weight till I was in my 30’s. And he wanted to bully me.

I wasn’t going to have it.

Now here’s the thing: I can recall vividly him on top of me, his knees up on my chest as he reigned down fists into my face as I tried to fight him off…to no avail.

I remember it.

What I don’t remember is the stuff on the periphery. I don’t know what year it was (had to have been 1984-88 because I was in High School), I don’t really know what season it was, or the exact time of day or the others who were there (maybe Jeff and Donnie?).

I remember being held down and punched…and punched.

So this idea that memory is all or none, is simply a red herring. A tactic to get you to look away, to avoid something uncomfortable, to take the road more traveled, of least resistance, the short view, that doesn’t require the heavy lifting of…change.

Don’t follow it.

You, we, will be better off.

Extreme/Confide

Life is lived at the extremes.

Can you believe I just wrote that bullshit? You probably can.

Edit: Life is felt at the extremes.

But what does that even mean?

Edit: Life is remembered at the extremes.

Ok, now we’re cooking with gas. Certainly, the extreme points of our life will be remembered more so than the banal, ho-hum experiences like commuting to work on a Tuesday in 2004.

But, [oh god here he goes] “extreme” [told you] is subjective.

[eye roll]

Climbing Mt Everest might be extreme for some while for others, ordering the veal, may be living on the edge.

I tell you this because this decade-long midlife crisis I find myself in has me thinking about life.

[fiercer eye roll]

However, with technology, the life lived in the middle, the heretofore, unremembered life, can now be brought to mind.

Behold: pictures.

Like this one I recently discovered in a box that had to be explored after our move.

That’s me there on the right with the Yahtzee teeth. Circa 1980 I am guessing, maybe earlier.

Pictures contextualize the ho-hum and the banal into a wistfulness for the mundane because you and me we were different then.

Remember?

Remember how happy go lucky you were and my god how confident you were with your let me at ‘em attitude and…

-Did you say you were having a decade-long midlife crisis?

Uh-huh, doesn’t’ everyone?

No and what are Yahtzee teeth?

That is when god has your teeth in his hand like a handful of Yahtzee dice and shakes ‘em around and then throws ‘em into your mouth all willy-nilly and however they land, there’s your grill.

You ever hear of braces?

Sure have. You ever realize not everyone in Barberton Ohio in the 70’s & 80’s had dental insurance? Or health insurance?

Hey, I don’t need this working-class hero crap!

You need something.

The point of the picture is that it reminded me that I was really a happy kid; even though we were poor and even though I needed braces and even though my clothes were often torn and often not very clean. I was happy. There on that beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, happy.

***

What does it mean to confide?

To whom do we confide and what does that person to whom we confide, say about us?

What if you confide to no one other than yourself? What if, as Adam Duritz sings in the song Speedway from the This Desert Life album:

I got some things I can’t tell anyone I got some things I just can’t say

Maybe you confide in others. Maybe you have people you trust. Maybe you feel known by others. Perhaps you aren’t lonely in the least bit. You might be secure in yourself and know that you are a good person and that even if you confide your fears and insecurities and all the negative space of you, that you will still be loved, by someone, in the world.

Remember how I said life was remembered at the extremes? I used to confide in people. I was a young man…and I used to confide in people; used to trust them…people.

I trusted the worst people. Trusted people that used that trust against me, in the worst possible way. And I am damaged as a result.

Irreparably?

Something No One Could Take Away

I’m reading Proust and the Squid – The story and science of the reading brain and did you know that Socrates was worried about the written word?

He was worried about what it would do to memory; worried about the power of memory when there is the “crutch” (my word) of the written word as a reminder.

Sound a little inane to you?

Well this middle aged googled-brained sapien wants his memory back. I’m not talking anything major but considering the power of my memory in undergrad that allowed me to ace a perfect score on a Continental Rationalism Spinoza exam and with now and how if I get rolling in a conversation I can’t recall this or that actor’s name or the bass player on Kinda Blue (Paul Cobb? Mr. PC?) or yaddi yadda, it would be nice to not have to google things or IMDB them. (Just used IMDB as a verb)

Consider this passage from the book:

                Certainly my children’s eighty-six year-old Jewish grandmother, Lotte Noam, would flummox future generations. On almost any occasion she can supply an appropriate three-stanza poem from Rilke, a passage from Goethe, or a bawdy limerick--to the infinite delight of her grandsons. Once, in a burst of envy, I asked Lotte how she could ever memorize so many poems and jokes. She answered simply, “I always wanted to have something no one could take away if I was ever put into a concentration camp.” Lotte prompts us to pause and consider the place of memory in our lives, and what the incremental atrophying of this quality, generation by generation, ultimately means.

 And I complain about traffic. SMH. But...

Strong word: atrophying.

It is, your memory, atrophying.

One of the first songs I wrote that would be played in front of people went something like this:

Do you remember, when we were kids?
Life so easy and so carefree
take me back now because I need to see
Do you remember?
I remember
Do you remember?
I remember

From the oral to the written and from the written to the digital…the times they are uh changin’.

Maybe I’m just wistful.
Maybe I’m just scared for my kids.
Maybe I can still recall the definition of god – being consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Mode – that which the intellect perceives of substance as if constituting its essence.

Memory is essential, from the greek ontos – that without which a thing cannot exist.

The Whole Time

This section from Paul Bowels’ The Sheltering Sky hit me hard:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times and a very small number, really. How many more time will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that so deeply a part of your being that you can’t conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.

Isn’t that just a terrible thought? That some memory you cherish, that fills you up when you recall it, when you know you need to recall it, will someday not? Irretrievable from lack of use.

To think of my parents, now passed, and beautiful memories of them once held, now, I don’t access.

And they are gone.

Others held to be sure but…not enough.

Growing up agnostic though I was, I used to think about how delightful it would be, when sitting before god upon my death, to watch the movie of my life. 

I want the movie of my life. So much. I need to know it is there. Not only my parents but my children? I won’t recall this moment where Juju did this and MisterMister did that?

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe before I go to hell, before judgement is passed on me, I’ll get to watch the movie of my life.

Watching that movie, knowing what is awaiting me, I’ll smile the whole fucking time.

Vandiehards©

If you follow any of my nonsense here you know that I possess absolutely no objectivity with regard to my children. None. Nada. Guilty as charged.

However, recall can be objectively measured and I feel safe in saying that Julian’s recall is downright kuh-ray-zee.

Example: on the lovely commute in to Providence (providence means god’s plan and in this case god plans for you to be stuck in traffic going 7 miles per hour on 95 north) this morning, I went to switch the radio station when Julian yells:

“No, turn it back. I want the rocker! That song was in Angry Birds.”

Ok. Analysis.

1.       He saw Angry Birds months ago and he only saw it once.

2.       The song was Paranoid by Black Sabbath and I know he hasn’t heard that since he saw Angry Birds, which again, was months ago.

So he sees a movie once, months ago, which contains a song for which only a portion is played, which was one of many in the movie, and somehow recalls all this months later after hearing just a few bars.

At this point you may be thinking Shannon, what the hell are you doing, letting the kid listen to Black Sabbath?

Anyhoo, this got me thinking about music on my lunchtime walk.

I thought about the fact that juju can distinguish genres of music which got me thinking about genres of music and how, when you think about it, Van Morrison is kinda his own genre. Which got me thinking about Astral Weeks which got me saying that first line:

“If I ventured into the slipstream…”

Ok. Analysis #2.

1.       Venture - a risky or daring journey or undertaking.

2.       Slipstream - an assisting force regarded as drawing something along behind something else.

Are you willing to venture into the slipstream, bold enough to go into the vacuum behind the body where you could feel weightless but can also fall out into the abyss?

Now Vandiehards© won’t disagree and there is a reason I named my last band Common One but for the neophytes let me offer the following for the van-love.

Jimmy Fallon’s first musical guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was Van the man and when he was introducing him he talked about getting lost in Astral Weeks.

But be careful. You might get lost in Astral Weeks.

Postscript:

You might be wondering, what comes after “If I ventured into the slipstream”?

“Between the viaducts of your dreams.”