.diminished discords (v)

a new series of aphorisms and short reflections for twenty twenty six.

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tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of the fire. that’s the famous dictum. i know it’s not fair to dissect a metaphor, but maybe i can learn something by it. so what are the requirements of preserving a fire.

you have to get some firewood. that involves planting trees (and that requires land). you have to wait (a long time) for them to grow. then chop them down. then split the logs. then wait again for them to dry. and only then can you feed the fire. you also have to maintain the integrity of the hearth.

there is a lot involved in the preservation of a fire, in other words. you also have to periodically clean the old ashes that accumulate (the good news is you can use them to feed the trees that you will burn later). but nobody wants to talk about cleaning those ashes, do they. it’s just not glamorous. worse still, what if the fire went out. then you got to find some kindling to get it going again. i feel like traditionalists despise kindling, or maybe they just don’t believe the fire can go out.

also you have to consider that sometimes it’s best if you let the fire die out. what if it’s summer. maybe that’s why it seems so often that traditionalists live in a permanent gloomy winter where you just got to have that fire going all the time or you’ll freeze to death.

it also seems to me that they never ask what a fire is for. it’s for heat, and light, and cooking. there has to be a purpose beyond the thing. it’s not right to burn trees for no reason (and if it’s religion we’re talking about, the tree you’re burning is the tree of life). at least that’s what i ask before i do anything. traditionalists seem to just sit there feeding the fire, looking at the flames, worried it’ll go out.

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when i use the word randomness i have something specific and simple in mind. i do not mean it in a mathematical sense (nor could i, since i have no idea what it is; i’m too dumb for mathematics).

i just mean the unpredictable result of free actions not in harmony from the outset. so, the opposite of conspiracy.

conspiracy is a very comforting concept (both in a cosmic sense and in a more down to earth, political sense). of course, it exists. but against a few conspiracies there are the many individual spirations that may be against it, or more often totally unrelated. and then the clash, and the result, impossible to say in advance what will happen. what is required is flexibility of mind.

(i’ve said it before offhand, but i’m liking it more and more now: i subscribe to jazz metaphysics; its heart is improvisation and extended harmony).

in other words, randomness is just another way of saying imperfect knowledge about both causes and effects. but, and this is important, even if you (or God, for that matter) could know all the causes (which i also don’t believe), that alone can never tell us about results. not reliably, and in every case, at least. in other words, life is too complicated. nothing more elementary of course, except for philosophy.

(it’s funny because i’ve often heard that the purpose of philosophy is to help us lead a good life; and yet so much of it ignores pretty much everything about life and just deals with abstractions that are nowhere to be found in life).

(i suppose i could call it ‘shit happens’, instead of randomness. but i prefer randomness)

i took to using the word because it sounds better than ‘imperfect knowledge about both causes and effects’, and also better than ‘unpredictability’ (those double prefixes annoy me), and because etymologically speaking random means ‘flowing’. thus for me it captures perfectly what i mean by it: an endless flow, that can never be captured, but must be rather... flowed with.

as i said, jazz metaphysics.

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classical theology adherents and other philosophical escapists always dodge the question of randomness (and many others) by saying meaningless things like ‘God is outside of time’. when asked for clarification of course they always end up in mystery. everything is a mystery if you refuse to talk about things that actually exist or matter.

so in this view there is no conflict between free beings and God’s providence. how? well, we ignore the question, obviously. but it’s actually more absurd than it seems, and all we have to do is pay attention to language (rather than use words however we want to make things fit, which is by and large what theologians and philosophers do).

providence means, as the constitution of the word implies, seeing ahead. it does not mean omniscience. if you really think about it, seeing ahead is incompatible with seeing everything in simultaneity. (not to mention that the very concept is absurd and clashes with every known reality; in other words, it’s an abstraction, brough forth to make things fit when they don’t). nothing disgusts classical theologians more than time. but they cannot escape it. they start to write about timelessness after lunch with their bellies full, and when they finish they are hungry again (and their hands hurt).

God is a great improviser because he can see ahead some of the clashing notes and act accordingly. he can definitely see more than we do, that’s for sure. but that’s very far from seeing everything. the very concept is meaningless. seeing everything is seeing nothing. and, as i do not tire of saying, the God of the bible is powerful, but limited. there is no omniscience, or omnipresence, or omnipotence in the bible. they only exist in philosophical treatises, and only as words.

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speaking of bringing things down to earth and dealing with what actually exists, i want to tell a story. it was something that informed my views on things very profoundly and lastingly. i was sixteen or so and i still think about it.

i was in geography class, and my teacher made us stay a little bit longer to berate us about something completely unrelated to the class. the thing is, this teacher who used to be normal and a good teacher, had to deal with his wife dying from cancer over some months, and when he returned to school after his bereavement he was a wreck and never recovered. after that he was an asshole (though of course, i understand him and forgive him). but anyway he gave us crap for absolutely everything, whether warranted or not (our class was actually quite calm and respectful, so usually it was unwarranted). so one day, instead of letting us go out, he made us stay after the bell. it was only a couple of minutes, so i wasn’t too upset. but it was still annoying.

now, my school was right next to a large steep avenue with six lanes and lots of traffic, and me and a bunch of other kids had to cross it to catch the bus. there is a bridge but as kids we didn’t want to make the detour to climb the stairs and then go over it and then down etc. we wanted to cross it more speedily, especially if we saw the bus coming, so we could get home faster. i did this all the time and so did everyone else, timing our crossings so as not to be run over.

that day i got out of class later than usual and was ready to run to catch the bus. there were kids crossing the street already and, as it happened, there was a maniac coming at full speed. he hit this girl, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she died. i got out of school just in time to see her fly through the air (though mostly i remember the sound of the car hitting her, and then her hitting a traffic light).

my first thought as a self absorbed kid was, of course, that it could have been me. every one of my classmates thought the same. we crossed the damned street with abandon all the time and, while theoretically we knew this could happen, we never really believed it.

so, in short, if my teacher hadn’t kept us in class that day for some stupid reason, it could have been any one of us. instead, it was this other girl.

so what are we to make of this. did God save us by killing the geography teacher’s wife with cancer some months earlier? did he make the maniac driver leave the house just a tiny bit earlier? and on and on. the ins and outs are endless, and that’s because there is actually no great plan at work in this. stuff like this happens all the time, and God cannot be in control of everything. say he saved this girl by delaying the maniac, or delaying her own teacher that day. it would have been another kid. or something else would have happened later on. something always happens. life is tragic, and often absurd. that’s just the truth.

so does that mean there is no God? does it imply there is no meaning to anything? i don’t know why it would, but lots of people believe this, including religious people who insist that everything is part of some grand plan. actually, the reasonable position is that there is meaning, and there are also things that happen without it. why does it have to be either or for everything. it doesn’t. more importantly it implies that meanings (plural) are way more complicated than a simple fairy tale moral of the story is possible to capture. we have to learn to live with this stuff, or we will go insane, or lose our faith and despair.

the alternatives, if you consider them, are all much worse, in my opinion. a world of simple causes and effects would be no fun, much like, say, a game that is too easy to master bores us quite quickly and teaches us nothing. the truth is the great things in life are made possible by all the terrible things being possible too. as the great Joseph Smith says, there must opposition in all things, otherwise there are actually no things. it’s all born from tension and release, dissonance resolving into consonance, shadows making the light obvious, etc. and if there is no tension and dissonance and shadow, that’s when there is no possible meaning to the release and the consonance and the light. (remember, it shines in the darkness…).

and the other alternative, where God takes care of everything, is even more abhorrent.

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one philosophical problem that i never connected with is ‘throwness’. (it comes from Heidegger, i think, which i could never get through; i don’t read german, and the english translations read like a man who has no command of language, or respect for anyone who might read him). it also seems to be a problem especially troublesome to the germanic spirit, but i don’t know why, exactly. it would make more sense to me that the germanic spirit would face reality with a little more balls and less whining.

having said that, maybe some people really were thrown here against their will. but i never felt like this was the case for me. i take responsibility for coming here. it was a choice, not an accident or an imposition.

furthermore, the place and family i was born in was not arbitrary. i could not have been born in india or scandinavia or mesoamerica in 1602 AD or 903 BC or yesterday. this i have a hard time believing is not applicable at least to the vast majority of people. simply because the opposite implies that the shape of our flesh is totally accidental, and or it is irrelevant for who we are. it’s also why i don’t believe reincarnation to be possible on a massive scale (and subscribe rather to the psychic residue theory of past life memories). the implication is the same.

it might be a comforting thought i suppose (i do wish sometimes i wasn’t ugly, but there is no way i could have been born a woman).

it does strike me as a bit ironic that it was Heidegger proposing this given his associations and who those associations blamed for all the craziness around sexual identity. but that’s life, full of ironies.

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for the musical portion today i chose another Bud Powell tune. it’s short, so it won’t take too much of your time. it’s a composition of his rather than an interpretation (though there are so many of the latter to choose from too), from 1953; at least fifteen years ahead of its time. it was the heyday of bebop and the man (a tragic figure, a holy fool of sorts, and a genius) was already exploring modal territory and being either ignored or ridiculed; not to mention all the other crap he had to deal with, including electroshock therapy and being drugged almost to the point of death. that is what often happens to geniuses (but would their genius be so full of passion without it? another irony highlighting the opposition necessary for life and creativity and love to flourish). he did have the luck and saving grace of being helped by an unexpected friend (almost a guardian angel, really), which gave him ten more years of creativity. this is told in the heartbreaking and bittersweet book Dance of the Infidels, written by the aforementioned friend, Francis Paudras, which i highly recommend even for people who are not jazz fans; it reads like a novel, and a good one; i finished it a couple weeks ago and i’m still thinking about it; it will stay with me.