February 28, 2007
Last Lecture
A fourteen year old girl living in Honeoye Falls is said to be the first person born without any inkling of the idea of history. Irene Dayton, who lives on Briar Patch Lane, may be the first of a new generation. This girl was discovered by my friend, former weatherman and helicopter pilot James J. McCarthy, who got into a conversation with Irene, and noticed that she had no idea why some houses in the city of Rochester had no garages. And she grew incredibly bored and exasperated when an explanation was offered--the historical explanation, of course, that these houses were built before there were cars! She just looked at him blankly, and said “huh?”
Oh my God, McCarthy thought, it has finally happened. A person born who is lacking the instinctive thought of the past, and therefore the capability of reflection which, in the rest of us older folks, leads to the inevitable conclusion.
For this much had already been established, in these Lectures which are now sadly, I mean triumphantly, drawing to a close; that the past is an idea that creates a category which, looking around and reading books and going to museums, etc. the world provided ample evidence for. But--and I am rushing this--the evidence alone is mute and out of context without the prior idea of the category. This I and McCarthy knew, and had often labored to make clear, I in my writing and he in his many careers as pilot, traveller and raconteur. But we also knew that just insofar as this is an IDEA a person has, there could be a person, or egads! a whole generation, born without the capacity for such an idea. It is, though described as instinctual, not necessarily given. To make a poor analogy, it could become like the appendix. Or more corrected, this idea of the past would have to classed among miraculous notions, ideas of truth, leading to religion--but it is clear that people in the past have had the idea of the past. And that there are still people, who have it.
But here is a girl who doesn’t understand why houses have no garages; and is not interested in the explanation! She would just as soon see those houses taken away. They are anomalies. So this is not that she lacks an appreciation of the past; appreciation is relative, among people who know the past at least happened. But, again, just having happened is not enough to establish the past. It has to be conceived of first, say by a child in the yard looking at trees.
For of course if the past arises in consciousness as a thought and then shines its light on the then apparently obvious age of things in the world, and enables a person to read books with a prior understanding that they are surviving from a former time, and are talking about this past, then I suppose it is possible that there could be a person who DOESN’T have this thought. In which person’s case then everything old would be simply inexplicable, out of the question, useless, a mistake, made by barbarians.
For again, one cannot infer the past from evidence, one has to know it existed to interpret the evidence. And this is not a relative function that applies only to some aspects of the past, but it is absolute. It is the fundamental category that is most vital for a person’s ability to comprehend the details. And the fact is that while McCarthy and I have long asserted this truth, very few have acknowledged it; most seem to have lived through it, so to speak, and become overwhelmed by their education into thinking the past is there just because time has passed. But anyway, before this girl, all have demonstrated that it, this past, was still operating. Now, what is going to happen, if all the pretty girls like this are part of a quietly invading army of ignorami--
And now I have said too much. This is the last post of Mortimer Shy.
Posted by mortimer at 02:11 PM | Comments (8176)
February 02, 2007
The Ultimate Train of Thought
It is impossible to historically narrate Christianity in a forward chronology. It is inspirational as a reflection, but impossible to begin, and impossible to tell as a story except as a kind of nostalgia, or a fairy tale. Christianity is still coming into existence as a historical reality and a fact. Stunningly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered in 1945, and this sets up a drastic recapitulation of early Christians, which simply cannot be retrofit with the traditional (already learned) past, without awareness that it is new information, gained by modern means, with modern tools that are as if ready and waiting to interpret the very findings!
Once again, the formula, the design, is there: the past exploding upon the scene. You can’t say, oh now we know and understand what actually happened, and use that to construct a new plodding chronology. It is just too spectacular a gap in historical time. One is forced to employ a different kind of thinking, in which this historical past is co-created in our own consciousness, and recognised as incomplete and impossible in its time. --If it’s own time was like ours, with our premises operating, which sounds silly. We know perfectly well people were thinking differently then. So therefore, this past, it wasn’t like this, and thus reality itself must have changed! Lord! A difficult train of thought alright!
But now, it is absurd to say that being a Christian depends upon whether you believe one or two propositions, and then assume that the rest of reality happens in the same way for anyone whether a Christian or not. And this is not just in the area of morality; it is a matter of whether reality changes, as a kind of backward result of a difference in reality, in history. Yes! It isn’t simply a matter of whether one has decided they are a Christian, on some personal criteria, but it is a matter of whether one is living in a Christian reality, which ought therefore to be in some kind of turmoil. Since it is brand new! It isn’t enough to have inward conviction and faith that is only reflective. If you enact a belief system and nothing happens to your sense of reality, then what is it? Pure conviction can’t stand, it will wither and fall; one has to be armed with continuous insights . . . derived from what one knows is the truth about history and what history has influenced, which includes the present. Which, indeed, must more and more be controlling this very present. God!
This of course is, at first, impossible, and always gets one is a corner, fascinated with the paradox, unsteady in their perception of what could, now, be a dangerously shifting world. The only solution is a style of backwards thinking, where the pure novelty of the world is seen as one half of truth itself . . . Ah, this I know.
But then, what kind of thinking is causing the other pure novelty we see happening literally everywhere, in the world born overnight of crazy instant communication, the cellphones all these travelers have, say, and the crashing incoming media! Surely this is not the future of the Christian reality! Is it? Stop the train. I don’t know. I was riding back from New York City and I kind of snapped out of these reflections, as the train pulled into a station somewhere. Like I suddenly worried I had missed my stop.
I looked out the train window. This fellow was walking by. Jesus!
Posted by mortimer at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)