This morning Barnaby Sandwich, hungover and grimy, sat down to finish off the last of the Passover gefilte fish while writing his entry for the Diddlesworth College alumni magazine.
“Oh, Wednesday, Wednesday,” he belched into his DictaBelt, “you almost got me, you sneaky bastard. Last night at Town Hall, Roberto Calasso began his remarks by quoting Confucius on the importance of the rectification of names, and I was tempted to begin my letter to you with a brief comparison of Confucius and Chuang-tzu; make an incidental nod to Shankara (who said that if you see a rope and think it is a snake, it is not really a snake, but you did really think so); and then make a headlong dive into a pit of false dualities, attempting to do my part to straighten out the confusions that bedeviled yesterday’s conversations and panels on Faith and Reason.”
For the benefit of his cockatoo Lucille, Barnaby mimed digging himself out of quicksand with a plastic trowel.
“I was going to argue that we are all stupid believers in our own different ways,” he continued, “and that the idea of a contrast between religious faith and scientific reason is a deadly red herring with deadly consequences. The conflict in the world is between two different habits of mind, or styles of reading, and the clothing of ideology or cosmology that these two systems happen to wear has nothing to do with their primal conflict.”
Barnaby belched and pinched his nose, and then walked into the kitchen for a bottle of medicinal red wine.
“But I have faith,” he said, “that the truth will continue to exist and to multiply itself without my aid; that the world continues to exist behind me even as I walk forward; and that those that understand this, will understand this, and those that do not, will not. At the same time, reason—the cherished ideal of the Buddha, the Mahavira, and any number of God-fearing philosophers in the West—reminds me that you cannot hurry the process of understanding, and also, by the way, points out that there is something ridiculous about a man in his underwear, early in the morning, strapping on a DictaBelt and attempting with desperate urgency to displace what he perceives as the misapprehensions of others with his own much more compelling misapprehensions. And so, all of that not said, I am going to begin with a different interesting point raised by Mr. Calasso. In talking about Vedic rituals, he mentioned ‘the confidence implicit in every act that the visible may act on the invisible and the invisible on the visible,’ and described how the universe depends on the proper execution of Brahmanic ritual. But the rituals only work if we believe in them. To put it another way, the world would cease to exist if the children in the playground stopped their games; and we all play our different games; and merely by playing we manifest our belief. We can approach these games with different emphases—as Chinua Achebe put it last night, also at Town Hall, we can follow Julian of Norwich in saying that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,’ or we can say, ‘For whom is it well? For whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well,’ and be equally correct. But in the end the truth defies all reduction, and for my part, I think Yusef Komunyakaa spoke the day’s most living truth with his poem ‘Ode to the Maggot.’”
Barnaby scratched, had a drink of red wine, and then quoted from memory:
“No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.”
And then he threw his DictaBelt on the couch and went out to walk his cockatoo Lucille. Lucille is a bit high-strung, and she spooked a ferret that someone was walking the other way; and the ferret spooked a chihuahua; and the chihuahua spooked a pit bull; and the pit bull spooked a police horse; and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will finish his column when he gets out of jail.
“Oh, Wednesday, Wednesday,” he belched into his DictaBelt, “you almost got me, you sneaky bastard. Last night at Town Hall, Roberto Calasso began his remarks by quoting Confucius on the importance of the rectification of names, and I was tempted to begin my letter to you with a brief comparison of Confucius and Chuang-tzu; make an incidental nod to Shankara (who said that if you see a rope and think it is a snake, it is not really a snake, but you did really think so); and then make a headlong dive into a pit of false dualities, attempting to do my part to straighten out the confusions that bedeviled yesterday’s conversations and panels on Faith and Reason.”
For the benefit of his cockatoo Lucille, Barnaby mimed digging himself out of quicksand with a plastic trowel.
“I was going to argue that we are all stupid believers in our own different ways,” he continued, “and that the idea of a contrast between religious faith and scientific reason is a deadly red herring with deadly consequences. The conflict in the world is between two different habits of mind, or styles of reading, and the clothing of ideology or cosmology that these two systems happen to wear has nothing to do with their primal conflict.”
Barnaby belched and pinched his nose, and then walked into the kitchen for a bottle of medicinal red wine.
“But I have faith,” he said, “that the truth will continue to exist and to multiply itself without my aid; that the world continues to exist behind me even as I walk forward; and that those that understand this, will understand this, and those that do not, will not. At the same time, reason—the cherished ideal of the Buddha, the Mahavira, and any number of God-fearing philosophers in the West—reminds me that you cannot hurry the process of understanding, and also, by the way, points out that there is something ridiculous about a man in his underwear, early in the morning, strapping on a DictaBelt and attempting with desperate urgency to displace what he perceives as the misapprehensions of others with his own much more compelling misapprehensions. And so, all of that not said, I am going to begin with a different interesting point raised by Mr. Calasso. In talking about Vedic rituals, he mentioned ‘the confidence implicit in every act that the visible may act on the invisible and the invisible on the visible,’ and described how the universe depends on the proper execution of Brahmanic ritual. But the rituals only work if we believe in them. To put it another way, the world would cease to exist if the children in the playground stopped their games; and we all play our different games; and merely by playing we manifest our belief. We can approach these games with different emphases—as Chinua Achebe put it last night, also at Town Hall, we can follow Julian of Norwich in saying that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,’ or we can say, ‘For whom is it well? For whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well,’ and be equally correct. But in the end the truth defies all reduction, and for my part, I think Yusef Komunyakaa spoke the day’s most living truth with his poem ‘Ode to the Maggot.’”
Barnaby scratched, had a drink of red wine, and then quoted from memory:
“No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.”
And then he threw his DictaBelt on the couch and went out to walk his cockatoo Lucille. Lucille is a bit high-strung, and she spooked a ferret that someone was walking the other way; and the ferret spooked a chihuahua; and the chihuahua spooked a pit bull; and the pit bull spooked a police horse; and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will finish his column when he gets out of jail.
posted by Will Heinrich | 3:00 PM
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