On Chill Rain, Cutting, and Moving Inside

We celebrate, of course, the spring rains, especially when softly falling, slight breeze. We share into a deepened sort of joy, the kind taken down to sense life force even alike the newly opened daffodils bowing, bent into the crossed, lifeless stalks. Also, while reluctant to cut, some cheer comes through the movement inside. 

We might note some parallel here with Samuel Terrien’s Job: Poet of Existence. His introduction cleanly asserts the direction of the book. 

“The poet of Job did not attempt to solve the problem of evil nor did he propose a vindication of God’s justice. . . he not only takes his place among all those who suffer, fighting with the incomprehensible forces of evil in the noce oscura, but he also can speak to all sufferers an authentic word of comfort, begetting in them the virtue of serenity over woe. . .

And we who read Job may likewise find a gain in the loss of self-sufficiency. ‘As pain that cannot forget,’ wrote Aeschylus, ‘falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’” (p. 21-2). 

Terrien proceeds to take us through the entire text of Job, just enough commentary along with amplifications from scripture as well as contemporary literature, so that the Deus Absconditus, the ineffable, the mystery surpassing human grasp, eases somewhat through the mist, unsurprisingly by the grace of love. Thus, the touch of comfort, the enlightening of peace. The gift of this text can be sampled in a passage taken near the conclusion as Job, after so much talk and rebuttal, finally goes almost mute in response to the Voice proceeding from the whirlwind.

In the presence of the holy, Job could not speak. ‘To make the relation to God into a feeling is to relativize and psychologize it. True relation is a coincidentia oppositorum, an absolute which gathers up the poles of feeling into itself’ [Terrien, p. 242; quoting Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue].

 

Presence in “Time-Out-Of-Time”

Wondering, ah, well, to be more honest, I’m grumbling about recent fiction and the too-prevalent topsy-turvy trend. Authors seem to feel it necessary to skip around among narrators. Equally, if not more troubling, is the jump-around time. Too often I have to waste time scrutinizing the top of each new chapter checking for time indicators. Authors show no compunction about jumping forward or back twenty or a hundred years. In short, a reader can no longer trust today’s composer to keep time, place, or point of view! Writers flagrantly violate the norm of beginning-middle-end. Why won’t they start at the beginning and continue steadily to the end? Like life.   

Today

Or maybe that’s not life. And the fiction was/is that it ever has been.

Consider the experience of almost any hour: often it includes wanderings of mind/heart/soul, maybe even the body. Perhaps the development of consciousness progressively and selectively includes increased awareness and capacity for getting out of “now” (and without losing the invaluable ability to choose to “be here now”).  Maybe there’s significant value in those impertinent remembrances and wily imaginations that just take off into reconstructed pasts. Even the ones that don’t go back cleanly but instead overlap into fanciful possibilities play important roles. The authentic path-maker, even pursuing the traditional ways, continually prays for revelation on “Whose woods these are?”

Maybe old boundaries need to be muddied by this quagmire wonderland of “What If…” Eric Auerbach articulates this phenomenon with the term “figura.” 

“… the notion of the new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent runs through the whole history of the word [figura]” (p. 12, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature).

Being present to “now” has the paradoxical capacity to participate both from the prophetic past as well as to reverberate even into future, all this in deepening meaning to the self: inheritance and destiny.

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves of fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act. In practice we almost always find an interpretation of the Old Testament, whose episodes are interpreted as figures or phenomenal prophecies of the events of the New Testament. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 73

“Reality” thus composes of a hodge-podge blurring past/present/future, perhaps making life more bizarre than fiction. And, therefore, negotiating this almost crazy-making holds the key to charting the authentic pathway. Letting go of standard time seems to be closer to the guidance from the Source than the steady mind-marked realism with its predictable increments. 
Special care is needed lest the animating force of wondering disintegrate into aimless wandering. Attention needs to be devoted to evolving consciousness. Engagement with creative art involving evolutionary change offers continuing revelation. This work finds articulation in constructs such as Auerbach’s figura and Jung’s archetype. 
The God-given life force, both through continuing guidance and in renewed energy, comes in such dynamics that break through the tendency to get stuck in prescriptive literalisms and to flow with the reassuring testimony of ancestors. Let’s look closely into the subtle shifts in seasonal change, into the nuance of character development in our children as well as in the opportunities of aging, including anticipation of death.

Help in negotiating time out of time has come recently in reading Amos Wilder. In Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, Wilder talks about the radical shift: hero as lion or lamb, suffering as good or bad signal, loss as victory. The need for continuing care for the individual’s self understanding as well as for religious crises regarding changing social issues requires “a new creation” that fulfills the old and that can only find “adequate expression in a transcendental mythical statement. Yet such vision, though by its nature it dissolved ordinary relations of time, space, and causation, was nevertheless rooted in historical realities and could therefore later be translated and applied to ongoing circumstances” (Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, pp. 151-152). Over a long period of time, good literature imitated this mythology. But then Jesus upset the prescriptions; and, consequently, interpretations and writers (and persons searching for an authentic pathway) found themselves in this “war of myths.” 

It is through images that all such orientation of the believer in an enigmatic world is conveyed. The world-understanding in question involves, of course, the heart as well as the knowing faculties… The new myth-making powers of the Christian movement meant more than an overthrow of rival myths and more than a liberation from letter and from law. It meant the portrayal of the real nature of things and of the course of existence as far as human speech could encompass such mysteries. Comparing lesser things with greater, we appropriate the myth and symbol of the New Testament by opening ourselves to its wisdom in the same order of response with which we encounter art or read poetry. Though this order of knowing is closer to that of ancient spell or visionary realization, or the world-making of the child, yet it is, for this very reason, a total and immediate kind of knowing and one that involves us totally. Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, p. 127