I’ve spent the day puzzling over the intersections of reason and mysticism in my life–perhaps the exercise is like spring cleaning. I’m straightening up the Cave of Making.
Nowadays I’ve more affection for intersections of contrarian and comic ironies than in my twenties. I went to college in the last days of the Vietnam War and was hotly pissed at imperial America, the invulnerable fascism of Kissinger, and inclined to admire Dadaists. I agreed with Mallarme’s assertion that newspapers are only fit for wrapping fish. I still feel these things.
But to recollect means savoring and if self awareness has value it brings to light satisfactions larger than the individual. And long ago, reading in the college library, I saw Bertrand Russell was right to say philosophy is the intersection of mysticism and science. In a primitive way I figured thinking might, insofar as I was capable of it, comprise both scientific doubts and intuition’s hopes. I saw early on that I wanted to remain angry and doubtful–as Neruda would say, “fully empowered” but that one also needs Carl Jung’s oceanic unconscious.
If you have a disability you know a lot about abjection and the acculturated marginalizing of physical differences. You also know irony. And you start to ask questions. You say things like: “Well if Jesus could cure a blind man, why didn’t he just get rid of blindness?” What’s a self-respecting man-god good for after all? Contrarian irony is a quality or caste of mind and ever since it was unlocked in me–unlocked quite early–I’ve been inordinately suspicious of cant. (For my blind readers that’s “cant” with a c and not with a k–though I have my suspicions about him as well.)
Comic irony is different since its a reactive brand of thinking–less suspicious perhaps. It’s the faculty you want if you’ve made an ass of yourself and hope to profit by it. It’s one of the ingredients of humility, though not in a Christian sense, its more the humility that comes because you’ve made a discovery by accident. There are other ingredients of humility, most of them appear in the Dhamapada. Comic irony is a good start.
But these qualities of thought are necessary beyond reason and if you tend to an affection for mysticism, to believe things are more mysterious than dear science supposes, you will need them all the more. What after all is worse than the humorlessness of the devout? And if organized religion gives you pause, the disorganized ones, all the New Age industries are almost entirely without irony. In my memoir “Eavesdropping” I wrote about a “fire walker” who proposed he could heal my blindness at his desert ranch if only I put aside my fears and walked across the hot coals. He was so insufficiently ironic he was predatory. But what about spiritual hope?
You take your shoes off to enter a temple. I take off my rational thought shoes, tell myself the moon and birch are brothers. These are two examples of inspiration’s hopes. Both are concerned with the mindfulness of the earth itself. Doubt may “will out” but not with my permission.
And that pesky Bertrand Russell again:
My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
Planet of the Blind 