Hive of Nerves/edit

HIVE  OF NERVES NERVES 

https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/#.Xg-BIJCIY1I

To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial 

anxieties of everyday life

It's time the

 stone grew

accustomed

 to blooming,

That unrest 

formed a heart.

—Paul Celan

ANXIETY 

how it's consuming everyone.

-how the technologies that we've developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety

-have only degraded the quality of the former (time) 

-exacerbated the latter (anxiety)

-how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode.

the way which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests 

the extent to which that relief

 is temporary

A couple of us

 admit  our

 “recreational” 

activities are 

of the same

 simmering

 near-obsessive

 panic as the

 rest of our lives

DOUBLEBIND

-private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective

-increased by not becoming collective,

-increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context

-anxious stab of self one feels in an anonymous crowd.

 not once in any form,

 not even w/ the ghost 

of a suggestion, did 

any of us mention God.

/James Joyce’s Ulysses;

Bloom’s mind is our mind;

 the welter of impressions

 he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. 

some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient

 person on the planet.

How much cruelty

 is occasioned 

simply because

 of the noise

 that's within us

an offhand remark which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. 

a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think.

our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to a vague

 wish for quiet

How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? 🦋

(“Be present w/your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,”  17th-century poet Thomas Traherne

the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?

the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque. The explanations only compound their opacity.

CHRIST'S WRY SENSE  OF HUMOR 

how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence. (/ experiential...?)

Behind every urge to interpret: unease/anxiety

 all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience

-gives an aperture

  to see our moments of

-revelation more clearly

-integrates mystery/

crisis  into our lives.

-to give them “meanings,” 

-complicates our lives

The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself. 

/private/silent power

compelled us in the first place seems

  to drain right

 out of it.

it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which it's already clouding over. In any event -cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.

-means no more /no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight

-is its own code to its own

irreducible clarity

GOD ISN'T OUTSIDE  REALITY BUT IN IT 

the uses / necessities 
of metaphor can flash 
us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths.

 The practical effects of music, myth, image, tease us deeper/more completely into reality.

Christ speaks in stories. It's  a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved but a narrative to be undergone/

inherited/transformed 

 person by person.

Metaphors/because something essential about the nature of reality—its mercurial solidity/ mathematical mystery and sacred plainness—is disclosed within them. 

He speaks the language of reality/speaks in terms of the physical world

because he is reality’s culmination and code

“this people’s mind has become dull; they have stopped their ears and shut their eyes." ( an observation about reality)

(Poor things poor little poopy heads!

If it wasn't for that)

"Otherwise, their eyes might see, their ears hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn to me, 

and I would heal them.”

CHRIST ISN'T 

AN ANSWER TO EXISTENCE/HE'S A

MEANS OF EXISTING

 I am convinced that there is no permutation of man or mind in which he is not, in some form, present.

 ‘When he is known through all cognitions, he

is rightly known.’”

-Catholic nun, Sara Grant

“To believe in me 

isn't to believe in me. It's to believe him who sent me. To see me is to see him who sent me"

(Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately

 conscious of, death.

 The emphasis might be placed differently/shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action. 

Our anxiety is less

 the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be.(The result of Soul Murder)

as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. 

"I don't know what happens when people die

Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try

It's like a song playing right in my ear

That I can't sing

I can't help listening"

 for a dancer / Jackson Browne

https://youtu.be/IU1rZa8Ur_Q