Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi
The Deadly Force of Chance
The Force of Chance
To die, to sleep, / To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause ... the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will ... (Hamlet 3.1)
Atheism is the corner in a room that one doesn’t really choose, for who would choose to die and never come back anywhere? Where is that country beyond whose bourn? Where has that traveller gone?
To be and then not to be, only to sleep, perforce dreamlessly, at which dreary point you’ll wish you were a microphage, even the type that does’t move one-sixteenth of an inch
I Know Not Seems
Seems, madam? Nay it is. I know not seems. / ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black, / [...that] can denote me truly. These indeed seem, / For they are actions that a man might play: / But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Hamlet 1.2.78-89)
To be is always better than not to be, although no cables stretch from one world to the next. It’s only in children’s tales that one can go through a mirror or enter a magic wardrobe that takes you, as if in a conjurer’s trick, to another world, wide as England.
You can never see both sides at once, unless you’re like that little boy in the movie who has a magic sixth sense: I see dead people. Or unless you believe the religious dreamers whose dreams seem to mean all sorts of things:
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. (Genesis 28:12)
It’s so hard to see the things they dream about, that one might conclude there are more things in the starry heavens and on the watery Earth than are dreamt of in their theology.
In the mean time, while we’re still wearing these inky cloaks, here on the lowest rung, dreams are only dreams, and to be is not to seem. And so it seems to me that being, not seeming, may be the most authentic thing to be. All those other numbers — the 7 veils of mysticism, the 12 tribes and the 666 evils of the secular world — all dissolve upon closer inspection. Yet still, they sound so fine when they add up to Perfection and when Plato’s numbers climb like spiritual bodies in a laddered Resurrection.
Lear
The grown man becomes a baby, the King a pauper, the athlete a paraplegic. We live in the glory, or at the mercy, of chemistry and physics.
Sooner or later, King Lear will rage in the waste land, and beg for scraps. He’ll tell trembling Edgar that unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
And yet we cannot stop ourselves from dreaming that we understand, that we grasp what’s going on, and that in some way we control the storm, standing tall on our barren heaths.
Khayyam
The meaning of life may well lie somewhere else, but until it does, genetic codes and facts will have to do. It’s a working theory that Farid ud-Din* had yet to scent — an attar of the field rose, uncapitalized, undressed in gauze or gold.
The dream of an ordered cosmic space —from the Sufi’s twirling Atoms to Augustine’s City of God, with its golden spires piercing the firmament, and Vishnu floating in outer space — must yield, for now, to the telescope’s prying eye. The wondrous union of soul and sense must yield to medicine, habit, and chance events.
The circle of life may yet be found to make a greater meaning, round and round. One day all things incomplete may make some greater Scheme of Things complete. Yet time has never been a prophet’s friend, and where we started is not, alas, where we will end.
They told him God would be his friend, and be there with him to the end. They told him seek and he would find, yet when he got there in the end he didn’t know what God was, nor what was mind. The human machine runs up, runs down, and leaves us hobbling on the ground.
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* Farid ud-Din Attar was a Persian Sufi poet who wrote The Conference of the Birds (1177). He was a pharmacist, and the word attar (fragrance) comes from Persian. While Attar shared some of Khayyam’s imagery, he didn’t share the latter’s secular and sensual bent.
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