As is no doubt vividly evident to repeat readers, there are several thoughts which preoccupy me. Two of them appeared to me as derivatives emerging from a passage which I read in Fr. Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy this morning 1 :
Preoccupation the First:
The idea that I am not my body. I have gained a lot from reading about Aristotle's take on this mind / body / soul thing, and I think there's great value to be had by pondering that perspective. (A perspective which I still think found its most profound--and succinct--expression in the Anglo Saxon poem, "The Seafarer" ((at least as translated by the great Burton Raffel 2)):
The soul stripped of its flesh knows nothing
Of sweetness or sour, feels no pain,
Bends neither its hand nor its brain.
I am particularly fond of that first line, and often truncate the expression there for the sake of clarity.)
But despite all of that . . . which, by the way, also fits in quite well with Philip K. Dick's assertion in VALIS that "we appear to be memory coils" . . . and that our human existence is primarily to serve as sensory receptors for God, to whom we upload our data through rituals . . . which, by another way, also dovetail joints with Kurt Vonnegut's assertion that our purpose is “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!” . . . I still have to say that I am not my body. You can cut off my right hand and cast it into the fire, and I am still me. (Isn't that the point of the Biblical sadism thing?) And after that, you can continue to whittle me down . . . half a leg, half a leg, half a leg and onward . . . until there's nothing left but a brain in a tank of bubbly fluid, and I'm still me. I don't know shit about physiology, but I'd bet that you can even carve a few chunks of brain out of there and serve 'em up to Liv Moore with hot sauce, and I'd still be me.
And from there? Well, at some point I cease to exist. What was that movie where the guy is holding a brain over a sink and he starts breaking it up, as if he's looking for The Rabbit in that Hat, and before you know it there's nothing in his hands? Might have been Man Facing Southeast. (A movie which had some peripheral connection to Philip K. Dick, by the way, which is how I happened upon it. Hmmm. Now I feel like watching that movie again. Good thing it's the 21st century, huh?)
Maybe.
Maybe not. I'll let you know when I get there . . . assuming that they allow blogging there.
But even without that last step, if you can reduce me from 190 pounds to 3 pounds or less, then I think you can safely say that I am not my body. And if I'm not my body, not the most vulnerable and perishable part of my self, then there is at least the possibility that I am immortal.
I hope so, anyway. There's still lots of pretty thoughts that I ain't thunk.
Preoccupation the Second:
Now, you know how this shit goes, right? I already feel it nipping at my intuitive rectum. (Hell, it might even kill 'em.) We're going to end up back at Preoccupation the First, aren't we? Well, let's go.
Small rooms.
Small white rooms.
Small white empty rooms.
I can't even tell you how many times I've written stuff with that image in my mind. In fact, I just started (hesitatingly, not really wanting to get into it right now because I'm 300 pages into something else which I really want to finish before I die) writing a novel which is centered on this idea. Kind of. It's the opposite how I live right now, which is very crowded and materialistic and dusty, but still, there's something about that idea, of paring it down to only the most essential stuff.
Which is kind of like lopping off a hand / arm / limbs / etc., isn't it? When you strip all of the extras out of a room, you're left with yourself. And some water. And some granola bars. And a toilet. That's really about it, though. You know, if there are enough prospective modern anchorites out there, you could make a killing by constructing a kind of bee hive hotel. (Note to self: don't let this get past you the way that your eleven year old question "Why don't they make band-aids for black people?" did. If you'd called InventHelp back then, you'd be dating Jennifer Lawrence right now, man.)
So there it is. The essential. And when you've pared down to the essential, all you've got left is God and eternity. Which is, I would suppose, at least in ideal why monasticism exists. So that you can focus on the essential and exclude as much of the peripheral as you possibly can without de facto committing suicide.
Okay. Guess I'm going to go work on that novel. Looks like my brain won't give me a choice right now.
1 Oh, page 1,074, thanks for asking. Yeah, it is pretty exciting. I've been wanting to do this for years. Like, really--Mott the Hoople / David Bowie allusion aside. Reading this masterwork has been a goal of mine for at least 35 years. Maybe even longer than that. So.
2 For whom I have great, hot love. 3
3 Not in a gay way, though. 4
4 Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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