Gazing up toward heaven

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)

His being taken away is a going “to heaven”; his coming back is a going “to earth”. The implication is that he will return from the earth not from heaven. He will arise out of the earth, that is from below; not descend from above. There is the upward movement by which he was taken away; for this movement to be the same, an upward movement, it must come from the ground. So do not look into heaven – there is only an eternal upward movement, like a let-go helium balloon – look to the earth and a rising from the earth.

In Christianity it is about resurrection, it is always a rising from the earth.

In Chinese, Earth is largely yin, receptivity, its trigram three broken lines; Heaven is largely yang, penetration, three unbroken lines. In reading the I Ching, the movement is always upwards, from the lower trigram to the upper trigram; and one looks for the “changing line” on this journey from bottom to top. If the “changing line” is the top line of the heavenly trigram, the third unbroken line – Jesus’ ascension to the Father, yang yang, yang – it changes to a broken line, yin. Jesus’ ascension entails not Terminal Station Heaven, but a new rising from the Earth.

They will speak with new tongues (Mk 16:17)

According to the Oxford English dictionary, Old English (no longer existent/existent in a new form) had the word ēastre, related to the word “east”, “perhaps from Ēastre, the name of a goddess associated with spring.”

The writers of the New Testament texts could not have imagined the Old English language, let alone ours, which developed hundreds of years to their future. But they knew there would be new tongues, which have arisen through the meeting of existent tongues.

I imagine a language of the future which fuses English and Chinese, and involves a confluence of daoist and Biblical concepts. This new tongue can express how “the ten thousand things” – wàn wù – go through and beyond their death to become something new. And so do their words (míng); for words that do not change and become something new are not functioning words (Laozi, 1.3-4). This constant transformation is the universal journey, way, or process (dào) spoken of in Laozi (1.1-2) and figured in the gospels of Jesus the shèngrén.

Christos anesti!

On healing

Today is the feast of St Blasius, where you go to the front after mass and a prayer is said in the name of said saint to keep you from throat sicknesses of throat and all evil. Blasius is an image of Jesus, Jesus is an image of God… Since the Bible tells history theologically, with a God-anthropomorph playing his part in history, the evangelists progressed to God-anthropomorph playing this part as a man… if God became a man, what would happen?

The evangelist Mark, in particular, imagined it would mean that people coming into contact with him would be healed of physical and psychical ailments. This is because Mark especially knew the wonder that… we heal!

We say today that we heal by our “immune system”. But, that nature-life has in itself the ability to regenerate, that things heal! – until you lose nature-life – is felt as a wonderous/”divine”. And that this principle of regeneration extends even beyond the life and death of an individual – the resurrection attests this – makes the thing greater.

We see this wonderous/”divine” in gene-life today. Today’s gene-talk talks about immunity/(healing)/ regeneration, and a regeneration that extends beyond the individual to the species, and beyond a species to living-beings as such, to transformation? Healing, regenerating, transforming: modern genetics is a new expression of the evangelists’, especially Mark’s, imagining of nature-life – like socialism was another expression of the evangelists’, especially Luke’s, imagining of community. We inherited these ideas, like genes, and clearly they are not redundant, yet?

Meeting God

I decided to visit a church I used to attend regularly with my now grown-up daughter when she was small –

Cut to the sermon, which the annoying priest began by asking, in an annoying way – had we ever met God? Duh! Here in Church, in Word and Sacrament, of course, or what are you doing, Mr Priest? But I thought about it anyway.

I remembered how I had remembered on my way to church that evening how my daughter and I would leave the church for some of the service (the sermon), and go to the little playground behind it. The memory of our being together then had had the effect, on my way to church that evening, of flooding my heart with love for her. And then I had thought about how the love a small child gives its parent is unconditional, undeserved, out of all proportion to who I really am as a person and as a parent.

Bingo!

I suppose, then, the annoying priest was right to ask about meeting God, for by attending to the annoying question he had posed in an annoying way, I can see now that I met God, again, then, in remembering my remembering of that time with my daughter.

This shows me not only that God loves me without any measure of proportion – like a small child loves its parent -, but also that God can be bloody annoying, like a small child that won’t sleep, or eat properly, and/or who will keep asking annoying questions.

On the Sun 3, (on Ecstasy)

Happy Mondays, Wrote for Luck, G-Mex 1990

This was shown on TV. I was 13 or 14. I wanted to be there and being somewhere like there was my ambition for several years after.

On Ecstasy, I did discover, you experience something which puts everything in a new light: family relationships, school, work, friendships, class, race, sex, politics, all the ways in which you felt you had to appear to the world – all relationships – every internal and external antagonism – every human hatred – was seen to be based on the negligable and sad delusion that your fellow was not – like you – utterly, unfathomably – yet fully recognisably – full of glory.

In this moment, the worship of the Sun was conducted through music and dance. You can see how it demanded the total submission of body and thought, the rendering of your self to its propulsion.

We weren’t literally or consciously worshipping the Sun of course. And there was a lot of musicianship, engineering, entrepeneurship and above all chemistry behind it. But it was not musicianship, engineering, entrepeneurship or chemistry we were worshipping, except insofar as they too have their place under the Sun.

This song lasted 8 minutes. Then the musicianship stopped; the engineers packed away; the workers went home; the chemicals wore off. In many cases this provoked a crisis of faith. But, that it goes dark and cold, and that we die – that does not mean that we never lived under the Sun.

Misanthropism, 6 (Thanatos)

Oops, perhaps misanthropy is just another word for “death-drive” in Civilization and its Discontents, whereby ethics is a question of controlling the desire to destroy.

We are a hateful species. We hate others. Do we hate them for their humanity? Yes. Hence, we are a misanthropic species. Man hates his own species – though not (naturally) himself. In fact, his loving of himself is the cause of his hatred of the other. One’s offspring are caught in this because they are both oneself and an other. (Inverting Freud though, I think the Primal Trauma is a parent killing its child.)

Love and friendship is a welcome relief and an exception, in which I find myself, which I love, somehow “in” another. Love etc. is not a contrast or “other side of the coin” or expression of another “drive”, except as an externalization or projection of my love of myself. Thus love-of-self imposes itself on the hated other. Thanatos is the law of my relation to the world; whereas Eros is the law of Ego (I am always in the right!) Conscience – I am in the wrong! – is hateful, it is the hated world imposing upon me, such that I internalize the repression of hatred for the sake of something good, like society, peace or survival. Conscience is the origin of self-hatred. Yet the Ego actually forgets conscience pretty quick on its own; remission/forgiveness simply try to bring this process back under control of conscience, for better or worse.

Misanthropism, 5 (on ethics, laughter and peoples)

Germans: highly ethical, and utterly unable to conceive of themselves as an object of humour. Highly dangerous.

English: utterly unscrupulous and immoral. Happy to laugh at themselves. Highly dangerous.

Russians: happy to laugh at themselves, unable to love themselves, constantly projecting a love of humanity or nation instead, fatalistic lack of ethics. Highly dangerous.

Americans: no such thing. Not a nation. Slavery. No self-love. Hence endless pledges of allegiance. Highly dangerous, despite humour and some ethics.

Chinese: see Germans.

Christian-nationalists: see Germans.

Romans: see English and Americans. Yet without humour. Highly dangerous.

Un-Nationed: Humour, ethics, lack of self-love or hatred, lack of hatred for humanity. Dangerous to themselves.

Misanthropismists: See Un-Nationed, ethics, humour, danger of self-hatred.

Misanthropism, 4 (ethics and laughter)

There’s not much to say about ethics. The rules are clear, the Ten Commandments, hate others as you would have them hate you. Hate thy neighbour as thou hateth thyself is difficult, since one does not hate oneself (normally): its meaning is probably – let the neighbour hate you as you hate him; let him love himself as you love yourself. Live and let live, hate and let hate, love yourself and let love-yourself.

Misanthropism is not a funny thing, the hatred of humanity is no laughing matter, as such. Yet misanthropic life is only manageable through laughter, and laughter needs others. Humour is the only antidote that exists to misanthropy, and it is the basis of friendship. As with friendship, humour is constantly attacked by the natural misanthropic instinct such that it loses its effect as antidote and reinforces miserable misanthropic feelings. Ethics isn’t funny but it’s helpful in the battle to keep misanthropy at bay when joking. Its ethical rule is laugh-with not laugh-at others; or laugh-at others as you would have them laugh-at you.

Misanthropism, 3 (and love)

Love of humanity cannot be the basis of ethics; it is the basis of the abolition of ethics, law/rules, God even.

The feeling upon which ethics is based is hatred of humanity. Misanthropism is ethics. My claim is that man encounters man in a spirit of hatred, fundamentally. Man is not born an emotional tabula rasa, as it were; he is wired to view others with hostility.

But then there is the feeling of love. Humans feel this not for others as such but for specific individual humans, above all it exists between parents and children, ie it is very closely tied to love of oneself. But man’s general misanthropy constantly attacks these relationships of love (especially of oneself: misanthropy is especially hating other people loving themselves) and the main effort of family life is to defend relationships of love from misanthropy. A common error is to think that misanthropy has its roots in relationships: the opposite is the case. Placing the origin of misanthropy in relationships fails to understand how hatred got into relationships in the first place – through humans’ innate hostility towards and hatred of one another as a characteristic of the species homo odio.

It is wrong to think that the feeling of love which is found in relationships in which the love of oneself is or can be extended onto humanity as such through epigenesis and education or, heaven forbid, law. This is not the case. Mostly “a love of humanity” expresses and entrenches opposite feelings.

Misanthropism, 2 (not sin, not culture, not illness)

It isn’t simply the old idea of sin I’m getting at. The idea of sin is attached to the idea of disobedience to God and/or law/rules. The feeling of hatred I am describing is perfectly congruent with obeying laws/rules. And it is not an idea of “original sin” either, which explains how God can be believed to be at once good and also as having made us in his own image!

I also don’t think that human hatred is contingent, that we or I am caught in an ascetic or moralising culture of hatred of humanity for itself that can be replaced by a new man, be he the pious or virtuous man or woman; the socialist, feminist, pre- or post-colonial person; or an übermensch; or a humanity evolved into a hateless species, or a species which celebrates hatred. Seeing hatred all around and within, I see the fancy and fairy story of the better- or super-man idea, however very desirable such things are. I do not advocate learning to like hatred either, which is equally impossible.

Nor is hatred to be seen as an illness of any sort that can be cured in any way.

I only draw attention to the hatred of humanity and express scepticism about any course of action, or ethics, other than one which aims at the amelioration of this hatred.