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strike me anywhere
Losties,
In my office at midnight again. If I dropped all the
beanbags-of-the-universe I'm juggling right now, a few people would be angry
or irritated or disappointed, then they would stop. And that sounds nice.
But, then, if I can just keep these things all rotating for a while longer,
I'll achieve the goals I was trying to achieve, and they're still
worthwhile.
(Switching metaphors: )
It's the later parts of these journeys that take the most bare endurance.
Hi. (Starting over.) It's midnight and I'm in my office again. At least I
can play ffr loudly.
Is Kyle here anymore? There's some occasions I'da thought he'da risen to
lately . . .
Notes to cosmos: never mix sarcasm and apology.
There. That's me gettin' all publicly nasty. No good, really. And so I
wonder again where Kyle is.
I dangled an "is" at the end of the sentence, and I'm not taking it back. I
may dangle some prepositions in a moment.
Damn, "when I go" is all emotion, isn't it?
"i'm not letting go of God / I'm just losing my grip"
That's the punctuation from the album sleeve.
Significance to punctuation? Maybe? The "I" that's letting go is a
prideful, self-assured "I" compared to the "i" that has let go already?
Maybe not. But these lines are intriguing.
And so I'm thinking about these lines in terms of Christianity, but I think
I'll go broader in a second. Some people have a death grip on God. Yeah.
Good. Death grip. And that's what allowed Ol' Man Nietzsche (yes, from
Scooby Doo) to anounce that, as far as the affections of Euro-American
culture go, God is dead. Because to the Euro-American culture God was this
thing that they had held in their hands so, so tight, and then God was this
dead thing lying in their hands, and God didn't do the things they wanted or
act the ways they wanted and, in fact, didn't do anything, so God was dead.
But God can't be grasped that way. Holding on to God is impossible, because
getting your (metaphysical) hands (read: mind) around God is impossible.
Too much. Can't recognize the shape. Like that. And so when philosophers
businessmen housewives children rockstars or other folk make their top ten
lists about what God is and then try to hold onto the God of the top ten
lost, they all find themselves holding onto an illusion. But if we loosen
our grip on God, if we allow that we can't even get a tight grip on God,
then we allow ourselves into a world with a whole lot less clarity. But a
whole lot more God. I read the Bible. I think the thoughts of a Christian
(and sometimes those of a devil). I work the problems. ("I am raising the
arguments, writing the installments.") And I think I can say this without
being heretical: that God is not something I understand or am meant to
understand. That I may know some things, and I may be obedient in some ways
when I don't understand why exactly, and I may have a multi-faceted,
unfaltering core faith based on the experiences of my intellect and of my
soul and of my body. But I do not understand God, and the God I do not
understand is more free to work in my life than was the God of my
adolescence, for whom I had built a gilded cage.
And if this song is about love for a human being, and not about God, then we
may say the same of human beings: the people we allow ourselves to love and
pursue and hold to are scarier but more full and beautiful when we don't
suppose that we hold them in our hands or, even, that they fit in our hands.
There are more surprises that way, more subtle beauties, and more teetering
on the brink of disaster . . . And that's better? Yes, I think so.
Um. Geez.
12:10 AM. Time to work.
See you later.
Fred
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