Understandings of forgiveness

Hera, on a wall in Pompeii.

Goddess of Marriage, women, family and childbirth,

 Zeus's father was the king bee of the Titans, he was a not too bright man called Cronus. One of Cronus' great fears was a prophecy that assured him he was going to be killed by one of his sons. Many will argue that this happened a lot in the bad old days when our Limbic Emissions had a less effective Department of Administrative Satisfaction. The point is, every time Cronus' wife Rhea, who was Cronus' sister, bore him a son he swallowed the boy.

 This left a problem of succession, which Rhea decided to solve by persuading her husband to swallow a stone instead of swallowing her most recent son, Zeus. And lo, when Zeus came of age he forced Cronus to regurgitate the sons he had swallowed, took advantage of his brothers, none of whom had any love for Cronus, and he made war on the Titans, took control of Olympus, became King of the Gods and in the family tradition he married one of his own many sisters, this one was called Hera, who's pictured above.

 In due course Hera had a more serious than usual disagreement with Zeus, this one was about which of her children got what. There was no trying to be reasonable, so in her role as Queen of Olympus she decided that as punishment for Zeus' constant infidelities, in the traditional manner through deception, she'd see to it that her favorite, not his favorite, would get the keys to the Oldsmobile.

 Say what you like about the close relationship the Greek Gods had with their Limbic Emissions and their poorly developed Department of Administration, but if Hera hadn't acted as she did we might never have met the personification of delusion, recklessness, folly and ruin the Ancient Greeks called Atè. She may have been one of Zeus daughters or possibly the daughter of the Goddess of Strife and Discord, but she had keen insights into the Human Condition. 

 Hera had asked Atè to help her make sure her disputed son Hephaestus received the due respect he deserved and it didn't all go to her undisputed son Aries, who nobody, not even Zeus liked. Relatively speaking, both Hephaestus and Aries were perfectly decent Gods, but the title disputed attached to more gossipy mentions of the name Hephaestus pissed Zeus off because no one in Olympus believed, even for God's, that parthenogenesis, which is another name for Virgin birth, was a real thing. If it wasn't Zeus then someone else had sired Hephaestus, and there was every reason to believe Hera was as well attached to her own Department of Limbic Emissions as any other  traditional Queen of the Gods.

 Well it wouldn't be Ancient Greece if Atè had managed to successfully deceive Zeus. Hera claimed innocence, apart from which she was a Queen and the Goddess for women, marriage, childbirth and family, and of course she was perfect. Zeus was furious, he had to do something, he grabbed Atè by her hair and threw her down to earth where she kept herself occupied by blinding the minds of both gods and men, causing them to do dreadful and foolish things.

 The Greeks believed in a kind of blindness and delusion they identified as Atè. It just came over you, it wasn't really your fault, but once the wrong was done, it still created a Blood-Debt. If someone stole your wife and took her to live a life of luxury in Troy as opposed to the rather tedious and isolated lifestyle offered to the most beautiful female mortal in the world by a Greek Property Owner who spent most of his time out with the lads beating up on neighboring City States, you were duty bound to get her back or die trying. This eye for an eye logic was well sourced in Limbic Emissions and is still very much a subject of dispute in those interstitial spaces between "I" and "Me."

 Nonetheless, Atè, somewhere in her devious soul, had given Hannah Arendt the beginning of her understanding of forgiveness. An opportunity for a New Beginning as opposed to some soppy excuse for not putting any effort into getting your own revenge right here on earth. 

Did Jesus have non-linear thoughts, the "I/Me" and the Beatitudes.

A Land of Ice and Snow

 To summarize, we People have a "Me" and an "I." "The I" is mostly somatic and when exchanging opinions "The I" issues from the limbic system, it's the grumpy old guy devoted to surrealist utterances, who lives in the basement. The "Me" is both sides of a gossiping couple called the  Prefrontal Cortex. "The I," being somatic and bodily, isn't big on language, the "I" produces "Affects" which for a doctor are the physical symptoms of an internal emotional condition that requires diagnosis.

Our couple, the "Me" has a bit of a cogitate, during which conclusions about the legitimacy of the "I's" position are  reached. Many of "Our" conclusions  are based on the perceived Affect "The I" position will have on other members of "Our" species.

Why on earth? An understanding of society is socially constructed. This makes it a symbolic understanding of something that may or may not be real. Like the curate's egg our symbolic understandings of the real have good parts and bad parts.

The other thing we have to try to accept is that we share these constructed symbols and together they comprise the cognitive architecture that enables society. We like to think we control this operating system but we don't. What we are is a little piece of what evolved to be an interdependent system which in evolutionary terms has been very successful but which in more recent iterations of Western society seems to encourage those of us with a more sociopathic attitude toward The Beatitudes.

Baxter and I with much assistance from Can Bobby and no help whatsoever from Ivan have come to an "I/Me" conclusion that "I" should henceforth be referred to as "The Department of Limbic Emissions" and the "Me" should be charged with the administrative task of running "The Department of Administrative Satisfaction, Confessions and Healing."

Our inspiration for this decision comes from Zhang Daoling and his "Way of the Five Pecks of Rice." Successive leaders of the movement became depressingly theocratic and authoritarian.They took to increasing the number of rules, decreasing the number of people allowed into paradise and to calling themselves "The Celestial Masters."

The Point is, with ICE in the trees and Snow on the ground I wish to argue for an understanding of the beatitudes that suggest they may have come from the non-linear mind of a Hunter-Gatherer and later his message was realigned to suit an Augustinian Iron Cage of Stalinesque Linear Thinking.

The question is, was Jesus cynically hunting and gathering converts to the linear cause and its demand for absolute obedience. Or was he in any way non-linear. Was his  "Blessed are the Meek," a rejection by the less responsive and surly of the absolute control demanded of them by the Trinity. Was "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit," a rejection of spiritual accumulation. Was "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst," a validation of the "I" in the basement roaring what the F's the matter with everyone then sticking a finger down his throat while the quarreling storage and hierarchy couple who lived upstairs admired an invitation to the White House Easter Egg Hunt and attempted to interpret their sense of abject and pointless emptiness. 

Plato, Saint Augustine, Calvin, the Neoplatonists and Interstitial Space.

A Ribosome Producing a Useful Protein

It's a fair habit, when looking into the face of a Westerner, to ask: "What did Plato and Saint Augustine do to you?" The point being Saint Augustine of Hippo, although he was alive six or seven hundred years after Plato died, had spent many useful hours reading Latin translations of Greek Texts, which in discussing Plato, was a more mystical and spiritually inspired exploration than the one Plato might have appreciated from readers of his own philosophies.

Augustine was a Baptized Neoplatonist, he'd participated in the self congratulatory ritual special making katharsis of washing away his doubts and ascending spiritually to sit by the side of the One God of the Neoplatonists. Augustine's famous prayer "Lord make me chaste but not yet" has followed him like a dog's tail down through the centuries, made him one of the chaps. But try to trust me, any thought of martyrdom was always the furthest thing from Augustine's mind. The boy was of the middle classes of Roman Citizens, ambitious for wealth and status, and asking a Roman to explain Plato was a little like asking a Victorian to explain the people of the Upper Zambezi to you.

Both Plato and Augustine of Hippo were firmly of the opinion that language did not do much more than describe what was already there. Plato saw language as a reflection of eternal ideal forms and pretty reliable so long as there was precision in the use of words, no incomprehensible mumbling, or poor enunciation, or purposeful deception.

Fur Augustine language certainly reflected eternal ideal forms, it signified real things, but it wasn't a reliable vehicle for transcending the earthly plain, exploring the inner world of the truth behind the signs which required an understanding of God the Creator, who God was, what he meant, what he wanted, and why he was so incredibly important to a person's career, for that God needed to say stuff. 

In a sense Saint Augustine, being ambitious for wealth and status in the world of Rhetoric, had an understanding of language which saw language as offering a more creative access to Plato's eternal forms. Plato's world argued for Apollo as the prime source of Divine Truth, he gave Apollo a voice through the Priestess of Apollo who served in the Temple at Delphi, a place of spectacle, games, theater  and pilgrimage. All the same you can't get away from the tongue in cheek of a dialogue that saw Socrates as a tourist, reading an axiom on the temple at Delphi's walls that read "Know Thyself." Apparently a friend had been queuing up and had paid for a chance to ask the Oracle the question "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Oracle had answered "No!"

Of course Socrates knew very well that he didn't know everything and he certainly wasn't the wisest of men and he also believed that Apollo through the Oracle couldn't lie. This left Socrates with the difficult problem of wondering what Apollo, if he couldn't lie, had meant by announcing that no one was wiser than Socrates.

Socrates in his own journey through life, started asking questions of people who'd always made a point of claiming to be wise. It turned out, Plato noted, they weren't the stable geniuses they thought they were. Soon enough Plato understood what Apollo had meant. Socrates the wisest of men because Socrates by knowing he knew nothing, he clearly knew himself. Henceforth for Socrates, his Divine Mission was to ask difficult philosophical questions of one and all, but mostly of Jackasses who claimed to have all the answers.

 The concept of Divine Truth is safe and well with Saint Augustine, less so with Plato. Saint Augustine, like all Neoplatonists, could be extraordinarily creative with his interpretations. He insisted that the Virgin Birth was central to the Christian message and that Mary remained a virgin through the conception of, the bearing of and the birth of Jesus. With out Mary's sacrifice everything else fell apart.

Plato, on the other hand, a man who was concerned with knowing how to understand knowledge, most likely would have considered the story of Jesus' birth a mythical account designed to elevate the individuals involved.

It's kind of like this for me, everyone wants a God or Gods. What Calvin did while God was back up the mountains confidently enjoying a ham sandwich and a bit of respite from his many errors was to give everyone a real powerful interest in experimenting with secularizing idols that offered more immediate comfort than the hellish and endless drudge of making fewer and fewer and less and less worthy people ridiculously wealthy.

But the point I am trying to make is not some obvious economic point about the cliff we've fallen off, the solution to which will be an End Times that offers an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, it's how, as a species, do we understand the space-in-between. To use a term usually understood by the medical profession, how do we understand the interstitial spaces. And I'm not talking God and Man so much as I'm talking the space between "I" and "Me," the recursive to and fro, a backwards and forwards between the two parts of thinking.    

My current thinking in the area is finding some comfort in the idea of this interstitial space suffering from an unfortunate confluence with some sort of infectious protein that has become available to out bodies as a result of an industrialization of diet

The Apocalypse, Descending Escalators, Calvin, Hegel and Wet Dreams

Mary Magdalene's remains were discovered

in Southern France in 1279

 Baxter adores the idea of my disorderly lusting, it's a solution for him, he can absolve himself from all sin by blaming me. He didn't like it, he was just doing as he was told, and it'll be I who enters Hades with an open mind.

It's odd and rather sweet that a substantial abdominal aortic aneurysm, a well photographed and much fondled giant of his kind, takes comfort from my attempts to emulate a chaotically entropic universe by maintaining a clock-like disciplined practice of concupiscence in an attempt to encourage Anti-Calvinist habits in others. The reality is of course, I should have gone all the way back to the errors our species made when the first Cock Robin picked up a stick and doodled an IOU into a clay tablet which accidentally got kiln fired when my creditors treasure house burned down and is now hidden away in a Dutch Museum.

We people in the Western Tradition do rather require the convictions of an End of Times to maintain a semblance of hope, and lo, please, pretty please show me the Western Mind that doesn't whisper the sweet nothings of : "Yes, it's just a feeling, but I definitely do think I go somewhere very nice when I die."

We have a damnation that convicts us at birth, it comes down the escalator spouting hatred unless we agree to behave thusly. Death is a blessed release. Here the Question Why is easily answered : "So we can escape the misery we have made for ourselves." As they say, the Apocalypse is the ultimate wet dream, it's the moment we reach the end of the line and stop "progressing."

It wasn't just Augustine or Calvin!! History is replete with goody-goody convictions drilled into us Westerners by the very best universities that saw a flow of inevitability, a predestination, which totally robbed us of our agency and handed the responsibility over to the Big One. Even bloody Hegel, and to a certain extent Kant saw the predestination of our species, none of it our choice. Hegel envisioned his phenomenology of spirit as a preordained process. The Owl of Minerva, Hegel quipped, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. He meant we only understand reality and history when it's finished and too late to do anything about.

I hope you too find this as deeply offensive as Hannah Arendt did. She saw these holy trinity structures of thinking as a wide open route map for the malevolent minds that claim to understand the direction of history and this special, unique understanding justifying their use if violence today for a Synthesis tomorrow.

Anyway, and this is very, very interesting for anyone still interested in the moods of The Trinity. In 2016 Pope Francis elevated Saint Mary Magdalene's feast day to the same status as that of boy saints. For a gal who had struggled with Seven Demons, each demon representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, until she met Jesus who wanted her to be an Apostle to the Apostles, follow him around and financially care for her so she could assist him with his ministry, even if it does sound as though Jesus adopted her as a corporate welfare officer, really does sound something like a Pope breaking a glass ceiling for someone who might have enjoyed life.