Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

The English Garden of Sense

Giardino Inglese - Grey - Questions

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Giardino Inglese

Sitting on a bench in the Giardino Inglese, Claudia looked out onto the fountain and the blue sky behind it. A Mac Air was open on her lap. Stalled on certain passages of philosophy, she was trying to articulate what she thought about the sky, the still palm trees, and the statues of children playing in the spray.

Since she was a child, Claudia had been like those children, playing in the real world around her, largely uninterested in what her parents told her about what lay beyond the blue sky. Even as a ten-year old, she could feel the value of the water and the light. This made her doubt what the priests said about the Water and the Wine, the Ascent to the Heaven, and the Light.

In her final years of high school, she turned to poetry and psychology, to geography and history, and to philosophies that explored the meaning of life in ways she hadn’t been told about. As soon as she finished her scuola superiore, she enrolled at the University of Palermo, taking courses in Anthropology, Human Geography, English, and Philosophy.

Claudia’s biggest interest was the relation between doubt and belief. She doubted everything, yet wanted to know why so many people believed that they'd found the Truth. With a capital T. Catholics had the One Truth. Protestants had the One Truth. Muslims had the One Truth. Atheists knew with absolute certainty that all the believers were wrong. Claudia, on the other hand, had no faith whatsoever. In anything. Nor in nothing. In this, Claudia imagined that if she was anything, it was an empiricist. By default.

Empiricists believed that we’re creatures of our senses, and that any system we fashion in our mind is a function of our senses. Our belief system, like our mind and the senses that feed into it, are all unreliable narrators, all inconsistent judges of abstract meaning. Still, even though we can’t rely on the systems that we imagine in the theatre of our mind, we’re still engaged in life. We still live and breathe, meet people, laugh, wonder at the sky, and conjecture about what it all means. We’re still connected. Doubting systems and being alive to the ever-chaning world aren’t mutually exclusive. Looking down at her screen, she saw again the passage written by David Hume back in 1777: “Nor can there remain any suspicion, that this science [of empiricism] is uncertain and chimerical; unless we should entertain such a scepticism as is entirely subversive of all speculation, and even action.”

Claudia doubted everything, yet cherished her ability to doubt, to change, and to work toward a philosophy that might embrace both the changing nature of life and an understanding of this change. Two hundred years ago, Hume asked questions that she asked now:

… shall we esteem it worthy the labour of a philosopher to give us a true system of the planets, and adjust the position and order of those remote bodies while we affect to overlook those, who, with so much success, delineate the parts of the mind, in which we are so intimately concerned? … may we not hope that philosophy […] may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?

Claudia constantly probed the experience of understanding, one minute advancing toward insight, certainty, even belief, and the next backing away from it all: the truth, verification, her senses. The truth seemed to be an enticing mirage whose final value lay in its dissipation. Looking up into the fountain, it seemed a pretty mist that shrouded the true shape of things. But wasn’t this shroud a miraculous one — not some Shroud of Turin that the Vatican yanked back whenever scientists looked too close — but one that hovered on the surface of life, enticing us to continue, walk Dante’s diritta via, climb the ladder, make the calculation, ascend the stairway to Heaven, al cielo che più de la sua luce prende. Open the magic door.

One moment she felt like there might be a divine Order that made everything come together, yet the next she felt that the world was a mess of prejudice and absurdity, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Whenever she looked around her, she saw life from a different angle. In the morning her eyes seemed bluish green, and in the afternoon they seemed greenish blue. A world of seems. Her skin seemed honey-coloured at dawn, amber at dusk. Opening a new window, she wrote a poem dedicated to grey-eyed Athena:

Grey

A Trick of the Light

The morning glistens and there has to be a God, because the air itself is a prism of many colours.

Then the day wanes, and there can’t be a God, because everything is swallowed up in darkness.

A Trick of the Night

The day wanes, and there can’t be a God, because everything is swallowed up in darkness.

Then the morning glistens and there has to be a God, because the air itself is a prism of many colours.

She shut her screen and looked up at the children, frozen in childhood in the mist. How innocent it all seemed! Yet she knew she wasn't like the girl in the fountain, made of bronze, forever stretching her arm out gently through the spray, forever lifting up the boy she cared for. Her life wasn't a Grecian Urn. The words of Keats skipped through her mind — Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! — and disappeared in the mist.

She knew that the boy would grow up, grow out of love, go off on his separate path. La sua via qualunque. She knew that she too would grow old, become Shakespeare’s lean and slippered pantaloon, and die. The park itself would succumb, in time, to space.

… like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

She opened her Mac Air. Looking up to the blue sky and then down to the luminous white square beneath, she started her philosophy term paper:

Questions

Can’t we affirm, with geometric precision, that we all see the world from our own unique angles? Don’t these angles change every time we turn our heads, every time we walk into another room? Don’t they change every minute we breathe, as the neuron currents of thought and feeling reinvent the world outside? In his Treatise of 1739, David Hume writes:

Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, [even] for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where [various] perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in differen[ces], whatever natural propensi[ty] we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.

We float in a sea of indeterminacies, yet most people like to talk about platonic notions of certainty. Even atheists cling to Science, as if it were the Sun and all the religious people in the world were worshipping candle-lit shadows in a cave. How can so many people be so completely convinced that they see reality as it is? As it is. What on Nature’s green earth does that mean?  

Claudia looked up into the sky, the blue sky peopled with fantastical beings … this majestic roof fretted with golden fire ... nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende fu’ io … in the Heaven that receives more of His light was I … . How, she wondered, do people go from giving airy spaces a habitation and a name to believing their fabrications are real? How can anyone profess to know the truth about this life or the next? If there is a next, she added to herself.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it: one moment she's lying on her deathbed and the next moment she's in some other where, some other when, all of which pops up in front of her the moment she dies.

She opened her eyes. The sky was still blue.

She knew there were other skies beyond the sky she knew. There had to be life elsewhere in the universe. She hoped that there would also be another life for her. But did hoping make it so? If only there was some nexus of meaning and she could plug into the nerve centre, the brain of the universe. But all she saw were fabrications, excuses, dreams, and hopes.

As a girl she had been frustrated with adults and their explanations. When her parents told her, Gesù è morto perché abbiamo peccato, Jesus died because we sinned, she would ask, Ma perché? They thought she wanted to know the cause behind the cause they had just given her. Her mother seemed to think that everything was one big chain of Cause and Effect, going back to the Primum Mobile, the ninth heaven where everything was spun into motion. This is what she’d been told in church.

But it all went over her head, sort of like the Primum Mobile. 

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