Greetings,
I read your post a number of times, and couldn't seem to find the
right words to respond. So I offer a website as a pointer to my
missing appreciation:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/
Marsha
At 11:39 AM 1/30/2008, you wrote:
>Steve, Ian, all...
>
>Good discussion. My quick two cents is that underlying all this talk
>about "faith" is Pirsig's seminal point from ZMM, "All this is just
>an analogy". And when you start with that simple observation, you can
>see that the problems with "faith" occur as one tries to solidify or
>literalize the metaphor. Yes, at the root of our experience is an
>inescapable black hole of Godelian incompleteness. We must accept
>that the deeper and deeper we dig into the layers of language and
>symbolic representae we build to describe the world, the closer and
>closer we come to the inexpressable, unknowable, indescribable abyss.
>Towards this, yes, we cannot escape "faith" in that this core is
>always beyond our intellection, never capturable in symbolic language.
>
>But as we move farther and farther from this one simple premise, we
>must remember that the symbolic edifice we construct in attempts to
>understand this abyssal core are always metaphoric. We can cast this
>core as "God", and write anthropomorphic stories in an attempt to
>paint aspects of this "God" into understandable symbolic code. These
>"myths" are always and everywhere undertaken out of a desire to, like
>art, approach the indescribable by creating symbolic markers in the
>hopes that these markers will serve to point people towards the
>moment of enlightenment, what Pirsig calls "pre-intellectual awareness".
>
>In this way, "myths" are like "paintings" or "symphonies" or
>"sculpture". They are textual-artistic creations made in the hope of
>capturing, in the fleetingest of moments, a glimpse into that which
>can never be approached directly, that which can only be approached
>tangentally, that which can only ever be seen out of the corner of
>our eyes. And like visual or aural art, textual art serves a grand
>purpose of giving us the only means we have to see the "Godhead",
>"Quality", "the Tao". Often this is expressed as "esoteric versus
>exoteric meaning". We know what the stories say, for example, but
>what do they mean? A literal read, an exoteric read, misses the art,
>misses the metaphor, and instead replaces the path to enlightenment
>with the path to power. No longer are "myths" textual paths to the
>undefinable core but instead paths for human power, control and the
>manipulation of others. We replace the fundamental, indefinable point
>of similarity with a hierarchy of supremacy.
>
>We would think it idiotic to proclaim any painting, no matter how
>artful, to be "the One True Painting", and banish and burn all other
>paintings as wrong or evil. We would no more think to elevate Bach's
>"Die Kunst der Fuge" as "The One True Music" and wage a campaign to
>ridicule, ban and dismiss "infidels" and "barbarians" who dare listen
>to Beethoven, than we would lift ZMM up as "The One True Book" and
>look down at those who read Yoshikawa or Dostoevsky as inferior
>heathens. And yet this is precisely what occurs when exoteric,
>literal readings of "myth" trump a deeper exoteric, metaphoric read.
>Instead of facing the mono-myth with philosophic curiosity, we create
>hierarchical walls of power and supremacy (and ultimately alientation).
>
>We can never escape the incompleteness, and we must have faith
>ultimately in the power of our metaphors to point as best as possible
>towards this void, but while faith built upon this recognition will
>produce ever-better artful glances into the face of god, faith built
>upon the literalization of any one given metaphor will only lead to
>power, hierarchies, and a hindering of human enlightenment.
>
>To this end, I have no problem describing the "Theory of Gravity" as
>a work of art, any more than I have of describing the Occidental
>texts or Lakota stories as works of art. When seen from a metaphoric,
>esoteric perspective, it is like traversing a large museum, with
>different representations undertaken to point towards that which
>ultimately can never be seen. And while one must, ultimately, have
>faith in the process of art, placing one's faith fully in one
>particular work of art moves one away from the Godhead, the Void, the
>Abyss, Quality, the Tao rather than towards it.
>
>My two cents, anyways...
>
>Arlo
>
>
>
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