Jest or blunder

Dear diary,

why do people care what einstein thot about god? That's like asking a plumber for tips about cuisine. What you need is a nutritionist or gourmet. That's why i read william blake. Blake specializes in the imagination; he's gone deeper than any of my other neighbors...

but my mom cares about Stephen Hawking for the same wrong reason. Why would it matter what a theoretical physicist or cosmologist thinks about poetry? (religion is a subsection of poetry.) I mean, it's interesting: every human should weigh in on the matter; but if Hawking says something atheistic, my mom gets frightened, and if Hawking drops one line that seems favorable to, say, deism, then mom breathes a sigh of relief, like she just found her long-lost car keys.

a creator who neither intervenes in the universe that he created nor deigns to interact with humankind. What a bore. I'd rather say that consciousness is always expanding and contracting (harmonizing and atomizing), and that we living creatures all once were god but we shattered into ourselves and now we're working our way back up to our former state (why "up" tho?—perhaps "aside" or "in"); this time we're hoping to surpass our old accomplishment, break our old record...

yet when i use those words "harmonize" and "atomize" i fear that i'm being too unclear... what i mean by the second term is the breaking down of complex forms into their simpler individual constituents; and what i mean by that first term (harmonize) is when small things listen to each other and cooperate to form bigger things, like atoms forming molecules that then form cells that then form organs that then form creatures that then form transnational corporations.

The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta)—a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed"—was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries—as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds.

That's a quote from the tail end of chapter ten of david graeber's DEBT, a very good book that i just finished reading. I like to think about the difference between a church or university and modern corporations like Coke or Pepsi. Is this what capitalism makes of our potential higher beings: giant vending-machine mascots? I wish that we could look more like Blake's Albion, or the Adam Kadmon of the kabbalists, or even Joyce's Finnegan. In my view, a Cosmic Falstaff is desireabler than the Apple Corporation or stupid-ass Google.

Here's Graeber again:

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine, incidentally. I borrowed it from the great Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, who pointed out that all this was happening right around the same time that Thomas Aquinas was developing the notion that angels were really just the personification of Platonic Ideas.

After that last word, Graeber adds a footnote to the text which I will copy now because it pleases me to do so (we frequently, in daily conversation, refer to & make use of the heavenly "Forms" or "Ideas" posited by the ancient writer Plato, but we rarely stop to admire the concept in detail... however, Graeber, even in the following notation, goes further than that):

...just as any particular, physical bird we might happen to see on a nearby fruit tree is merely a token of the general idea of "bird" (which is immaterial, abstract, angelic), so do the various physical, mortal individuals who join together to make up a corporation become an abstract, angelic Idea. Kantorowicz argues that it took a number of intellectual innovations to make the notion of the corporation possible: notably, the idea of the aeon or aevum, eternal time, that is, time that lasts forever, as opposed to the Augustinian eternity which is outside of time entirely and was considered the habitation of the angels...

I was going to return to the main text in Graeber's book, but this mentioning of the notion of "aevum" sparked a memory from a passage from a book by the critic Frank Kermode – he mentions these time-beyond-time words a lot in The Sense of an Ending. This is from the new epilogue (2000 printing):

The interpretation of narrative usually involves some sort of transformative manoeuvre, as when we find or seek allegorical meanings or make "symptomatic" readings that discover what, under all the appearances, can be taken to be a true sense of the text. The habit is an ancient one; a modern form of it is the physchoanalyst's interpretation, when, in what seems to be tedious succession of the analysand's discourse, something significant is disclosed to expert attention, something the hoped-for existence of which is a prime if not the only reason for listening to all the rest. So, in the disposable, time-bound talk of the patient, there is exposed what truly exists in another realm of time, an intemporal sign that may take its part in a pattern that has nothing to do with chronos; it is basic doctrine that the unconscious knows nothing of time. Nor has it anything to do with eternity; it inhabits that medium between, which could be called aevum.

Also, another literary critic, Harold Bloom, has a fantasy called The Flight to Lucifer, which, while introducing its character of Olam, says right in the very first chapter:

He had been dreaming the living book of his everlasting life as an Aeon, and in the moment of awakening he held that entire book together in a single mental image.

& now I can't stop myself from continuing to copy down the next two paragraphs:

In the beginning was the Pleroma, the Fullness of thirty Aeons, who made up the Chariot that was also the Abyss, a Depth that was there first, before existence. Or rather (as Olam thought and saw it) the true Fullness—before even the beginning, before the Pleroma—was one perfect Aeon and with him his thought and sight, she who was his silence and his grace.
     Yet from that beginning eventually had come the Kenoma, a cosmic emptiness into which all had been thrown.

I'm just quoting quotes for the sake of quoting, letting one quote trigger the next: I'm going nowhere with this. (But at least nowhere's somewhere.) So, returning to Graeber's text, after the above-quoted footnote, Graeber himself gives a quote of Kantorowicz speaking on Aquinas (I hope that all this talk of gods and supertime isn't boring my auto-reader):

According to the teachings of Aquinas, every angel represented a species. Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed all the features otherwise attributed to angels . . . The jurists themselves recognized that there was some similarity between their abstractions and the angelic beings. In this respect, it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later Middle Ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bodies, large and small: they were invisible, ageless, sempiternal, immortal, and sometimes even ubiquitous; and they were endowed with a corpus intellectuale or mysticum [an intellectual or mystical body] which could stand any comparison with the "spiritual bodies" of the celestial beings.

At this point, Graeber ends his quote of Kantorowicz and continues in his own voice:

All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assuming that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it. (Islamic law, for instance, not only did not develop the notion of fictive persons, but steadfastly resisted recognizing corporations until quite recently.)

So the prohibition of both angels and interest is what is required for the system of capitalism to avoid self-destructing.

I use that word interest as in "to ban the charging of interest on money that was lent". And I'm operating on the assumption that there was a vast western society that predated the current powerful far-western one, and if we label the former society "Islamic" and the latter "Christian", and we grant that both societies were capitalist, then we could note that the stability of the Islamic instance may have been due to its abhorrence of both usury and corprations. Tho maybe I'm wrong about this; I'm only trying to sum up what I think I learned just now.

It's funny that we Christians consider ourselves monotheists while we populate our metaphysical AS WELL AS our physical realm with many gods, but we think it's OK so long as we miscall them angels. But I hasten to stress that I don't hold Islam as any better; in fact, far from it: I think that true monotheism is ugly: one GOD equals one cruel monarch, one brutal fascist dictator. Monotheism is overrated. "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression" (as Blake always sez). The far better choice is to have so many gods that it's impossible to prohibit them cuz they multiply too fast. Like the enchanted broom in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Or as the guy who crawls out from under his broken garage door explains to Officer Duke in the movie WRONG COPS (2013), "I can't catch the rats anymore; they're too smart!" What I'm saying is that there should be as many divinities as there are existents. "For every thing that lives is Holy." (Blake again.) Democratize paradise: take it back from the landlords and "owners". As Whitman says of the animals, in his "Song of Myself" (sec. 32) "not one is demented with the mania of owning things". So I'm against the current god and I suggest that we all become a better god together. Here's another excerpt from Bloom's storybook, which I set as my ending:

This solar system, ruled by the Archon called Elohim, was as much a dungeon as any wretched stone cellar, with its inhabitants locked into earth by a cosmic warden. Laws of nature, instituted by the Archon, enslaved earth's universe and blocked even the ascent of the souls after death.

NOTE. "Ruler" is the meaning of the Greek word "arkhōn". Our term "anarchist" comes from the Greek "anarkhos" which means "without a ruler". To be against such rulers is to gain freedom. To escape from tyranny. That's why it's important – that is, important to the ruling class (for this instant, I'm speaking sarcastically) – to saturate the concepts of "anarchist" & "anarchism" with the notions of "chaos & destruction", as opposed to "order & creation" (lo, freedom can be used to achieve any end whatsoever): as tho to imply, "if you people try to govern yourselves, without us rulers, you'll end up with chaos, not order. Therefore, do not strive to break free of our laws; & yes, I call them our laws because they favor us, the ultra-rich ruling class. You the People are violent & thuggish, not us; that's why you're always peacefully marching & assembling quietly & patiently, while we command mechanized weaponry & militarized police forces. (And if you dare remain civil & humane, we will infiltrate your clubs & force the violence from within; then broadcast this "proof" on all our news-media conglomerates.)

Sorry about the above note. I really meant to end this thing with the Bloom quotation, cuz it matches this world that we live in. So just ignore the note & end with the quote, when you're reading the post to your classroom of wide-eyed toddlers.

P.S.

This entry's title comes from Melville's "After the Pleasure Party":

Why has thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Self-hood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life's gate?