Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Of Returning Keys

I think you covered the overview well of these two chapters. I really enjoyed the Shinto myths of Amaterasu and then the myths of Izanagi and Izanami. Actually, what this made me think of a lot was a PS2/Wii game called Okami. It's an excellent game with a beautiful visual style that puts some different spins on some of the Shinto myths regarding Amaterasu. You play as Amaterasu incarnate as a white wolf, battling demons with the Shinto mystic relics of sword, beads (rosary) and mirror to restore natural beauty and peace to Japan. Also, it incorporates a kind of ink brush drawing interface for a portion of the game play that you must use to defeat enemies and solve puzzles.



Also, I found the story of Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita. A fascinating image of a man perceiving the infinite in a short moment on the battlefield, "the moment just before the blast of the first trumpet calling to combat." I like ideas/stories like this when a character glimpses through a small crack in time the great chasm of eternity beyond, and it forever changes the individual. Another association: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, my favorite jazz, rock, bluegrass, fusion band, did a song about this little story, or at least a kind of interpretation called "Sojourn of Arjuna" complete with some great bass, banjo and sax solos. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a version with the full lyrics, this one is more of a prolonged jam, but in the studio version Future Man has several verses of narrative and exposition.(Bela Fleck on banjo, Jeff Coffin on sax, Victor Wooten on bass and Future Man on vocals and electric drums.




One of the other interesting quotes from "Master of Two Worlds" involved the nature of embodying the Cosmic Man in an identity reflective of the storyteller:

Furthermore, the revelation recorded in "The Song of the Lord" was made in terms befitting Arjuna's caste and race: The Cosmic Man whom he beheld was an aristocrat, like himself, and a Hindu. Correspondingly, in Palestine the Cosmic Man appeared as a Jew, in ancient Germany as a German... The race and stature of the figure symbolizing the immanent and transcendent Universal is of historical, not semantic, moment...


To extrapolate further, it seems by looking at people's interpretations of divinity, of God, we see much about who they are and how they look at the world. Your perception the divine's incarnate tendencies affects how you think about life, destiny and morality. It's a simple, but powerful thought. I guess the question to me is always: can we change how we view divinity? If we grow up with a certain view of God, only to find that it's a flawed view, can you change it for a better fuller one without losing the conception altogether? I think it's possible, but I think it's difficult. This shaping of one's perception of God is that point of having your own faith, or stepping beyond the childhood images of God come from parents and authority figures and basing your vision on experience.

Concerning your point about symbolism and God, I see where your coming from, but I also feel like there's something to having multiple, even diametrically opposed symbols, for someone or something. For instance, God as creator and destroyer on the face are opposite interpretations, but they both do place God as in power over the world, and thus, in a similar identity. It makes me think about value contrast in drawing, where you create a continuum of lights and darks from black to white, basically, and it's the proper placement of these that can create the illusion of depth, definition and form on a 2d surface. So, though the shadow and highlights might be conceptual opposites, it is this very tension that, orchestrated properly, creates definition and, if you will in an illusionistic, pictorial sense: truth.

Perhaps having logically opposite symbols for God is also symbolic in literary form. It is a symbol to show God's fullness with a nature that is beyond definition. Dostoevsky was an author famously praised by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin for writing characters in polyphonic voice. Essentially, Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky's characters were so successful because of their inner multiple-voiced identities. In a Dostoevsky novel, a single character will constantly have multiple desires, competing goals and seemingly irrational tendencies/thoughts. Granted, Dostoevsky himself was vaguely crazy, but these inner contradictions often give a sense of a full-fledged personality, complete with the inconsistencies of human nature.

4 comments:

Matthew said...

>For instance, God as creator and destroyer on the face are opposite interpretations, but they both do place God as in power over the world, and thus, in a similar identity ... So, though the shadow and highlights might be conceptual opposites, it is this very tension that, orchestrated properly, creates ... truth.

I'm getting the mental image, but I'm not entirely convinced. And I'm finding it difficult to express why.

So a question: suppose that telling this paradoxical story about divinity (God is completely and essentially creator, and God is completely and essentially destroyer) communicates to the hearer some sort of truth about God.

Can that truth be expressed more succinctly than the paradox itself? And if it can, what do you think the restatement might be?

Matthew said...

Lol, I haven't read this yet, but:

paradoxical truth

Alex said...

Wow! Thanks for the article link. I am most pleased that I can now quote from the NY Times:

"You can do an infinite number of things in a finite time — at least provided that these things can be done faster and faster."

Really, though, I enjoyed it, as well as the comments following. Fascinating, though, several of the readers reached the conclusion that paradoxes are merely absurdities produced when we misuse language, or use it for purposes it was never meant to really tackle.

I might like to phrase it as getting "anomalies" from language. Something on the line of poetry. Again, describing God as both creator and destroyer might be a logical contradiction in strict terms, but one is using human language to try and encompass/embody an idea or being that has multiple facets.

As one of the commentators pointed out, we might want to draw a distinction between "formal" and "natural" languages. Formal language simply doesn't work when it runs into a paradox, like a machine with a missing, broken, or misplaced part, whereas natural language is looser and meant to communicate emotions, thoughts and everyday concerns.

Matthew said...

Sure, natural language is generally judged functionally, on whether it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish.

So what I'm wondering is, is there any statement or story that is functionally equivalent to "God is creator and destroyer"? That does the same thing to us when we encounter it?

This might be the same thing as asking, "can you explain that to me in another way?"