Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
Beneath the Aonian Mount 2
Mexican Waitress - John Locke & the Vera Cruz
☕️
Mexican Waitress
The waitress is taking another break, sitting outdoors now, at the table across from mine. She's looking more listless than ever. Her left hand loosely clasps a bottle of Bohemia beer, while the fingers of her right hand play with her silver necklace. She casts her eyes over the plaza, as if looking for an image she saw in her book.
I'm not sure I've seen anything quite so dispiriting, or quite so mesmerizing, as the boredom of this Mexican waitress. She reminds me of Manet's waitress in the bar at the Folies Bergère, but with the dark eyes of Audrey Tautou and Sophia Loren.
Her jade ear-rings dangle slightly as she looks this way and that. Her fingers are delicate, and slightly darker at the knuckles. Her fingernails, painted dark pink, are cut short. The tips of her slim fingers are rounded, fleshy, perfect. On their tips she twirls a simple silver cross, dangling along her collarbone.
♰
It would be easier for me to understand that cross, or why she's wearing it, if I weren’t a fallen Protestant, one who got tired of protesting and no longer worries about what the official Mysteries are: who saw the Virgin Mary at Fatima, what the Virgin of the Guadalupe might be up to in Guadalajara, or which saint turned cactus water into tequila. I can’t help thinking that if she lived in Korea she might be wearing a silver yin/yang pendant, and feeling about the same.
Is the Virgin Mary tattoo on her forearm a sign of belief, or just a signifier of fashion, the latest symbol of belonging to some subset of the moment? Is it The Virgin or just like a virgin, just a confirmation of the smoothness of her collarbone and the perfect tension of the dark pink flesh of her finger tips?
And why do I use the word, just?
♰
John Locke & the Vera Cruz
We’ve had sense impressions ever since our most distant ancestors started to have feelings dangling on the tips of their fingers and tongues. Yet the meanings we give to these sense impressions are different, depending on species, culture, and time. To my dark-eyed Mexican waitress the steel cross might simply be a hard shiny object, and nothing more in particular. In this way she might feel the same way people felt twenty thousand years ago, or the way they feel now twenty thousand kilometres away. Or she might feel the hard metal and think of Jesus, a thought that wouldn’t likely occur to a Hindu girl in Chennai as her fingers touch the hard metal of the Om letters on her necklace. The Hindu girl is unlikely to think of Jesus even if she had the same size collarbone, or the exact same nerve endings on the tips of her fingers.
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) did a great deal of thinking about these types of sense impressions. The school of empiricism he advanced in the late 17th century meshed with the materialistic and scientific thinking that was becoming ever more prominent. Yet Locke also believed in the soul, God, and the Bible — perhaps all the more so as his theories put into question the essentialism of religion. I looked at this tension in Locke’s Double Key; here I want to make two different points: 1. while Locke’s empirical system uses complex terminology (dividing both sensation & reflection into simple & complex categories), his point about sense impressions remains easy to see; 2. while some of the particulars of his philosophy are superseded by later discoveries about the nervous system and DNA, the basic point about the primacy of sense impressions remains influential.
For instance, his refinement of the old notion of the blank slate was superseded by the fact that when we’re born we have characteristics already imprinted into the fabric of our physiology, all of which is determined by the insanely complex genetics of DNA, which no scientist of Locke’s day could have imagined. Despite this, Locke’s fundamental empirical notions remain true: 1. we’re products of basic physical sense impressions, and 2. we’re also products of more complex meanings, which (rearranging his categories somewhat) we might call secondary or complex.
One can see the impact of Locke’s paradigm in at least two ways: historically, his empiricism acts like the astronomy of Kepler and Galileo in that it separates religion from science. This separation allows for an explanation of reality that doesn’t require myth or mysticism. Myths change, but numbers don’t, and in this sense the scientific explanation is more solid than the religious one. Second, Locke’s paradigm can be extended: just as we’re products of the sense impressions we gather from our immediate surroundings, so we’re products of family & nation, language & culture, geography & history. Ultimately, we’re products of the gigantic frameworks of cosmic space & time.
Following in the general wake of Locke (and again rearranging his taxonomy), we can see that the basic meanings of touch remain close to the sense impressions themselves: we’re mammals with complex brains and agile fingers, and we produce objects that these fingers can manipulate. The complex meanings — which one might call secondary impressions & meanings, tertiary impressions & meanings, quartary impressions & meanings, etc. — are far more diverse and debatable: we have thoughts and feelings that are influenced by the increasing complexities of language & culture, geography & history. These influences are so complex that quartary and quinary levels soon overlap and blur, rendering any exact categorization dependent on viewpoint. Nevertheless, the larger parameters of space & time give specific and symbolic meanings to even the simplest of objects or movements.
For instance, if we cross ourselves by touching our forehead, heart, and shoulders, we trace on our bodies the geometry of the cross on which Jesus died. The cross itself, ♰, whether in life-size wooden form (Jesus on the cross), in miniature metal form (on a necklace), or in the hand-movements of a priest, takes on the following sequential meanings: 1. communal guilt, 2. ❤️ grace or forgiveness personified in human form, 3. redemption from guilt, and 4. ✨ entry into immortality and eternity. These complex, culturally-determined, historical meanings have little to do with two basic facts: we have fingers and we can shape stones and metal into different shapes.
The complex meanings of crossing oneself and the holy cross are only two thousand years old. This makes them exceptionally recent, given that we’ve been manipulating objects since the days of homo habilis — Latin for man who has, is able, is handy — who lived about two million years ago.
So, all of a sudden, in the final thousandth of the time-line which started with homo habilis the handyman, the shape of a cross symbolizes the transcendence of time itself. In the blink of cosmic time, we go from coffin to fluffy clouds, harps, and eternal love.
⚰️ ♰ ❤️ ✨
I don’t mean to be flippant about this timeline, because who knows, it might be true. Yet as an agnostic I’m tempted to add, ¡Ojalá! This expression comes to Spanish from Arabic لَوْ شَاءَ اللّٰهُ (May God will it), and takes on the meaning, If only!
⛱
Next: In the Valley of Darién
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