'The agony and the ecstasy of making metaphors'
Sometimes I think I use too many metaphors in this blog — that I don't dig enough at outright statements or admissions. Even context is hard. Context easily falls as overexpression — self-complicating. And among statement, admission and context, your interconnections come strong. Leave one out, and the other two grow endangered. The writer has to sign an implicit liability form. The reader has to watch in thrill or horror.
But there's never so much drama. No amusement park, sky-high-flying, rubber-bound, powdered-palm sweats. How our stomachs got flipped, I have no idea. Personal lessons sent flying land as shared smash-ups.
"We begin to know by making metaphors," Fr. Andrew Greeley writes, and it's good to have friend there tonight. The line comes in his essay "The Catholic Imagination of Bruce Springsteen" — everyone needs a starting point — penned for America magazine after Tunnel of Love.
Why look to metaphors? Refusal to let our lives go unexamined. Our transmissions may be "ineptly accomplished," Greeley says, but still.
The preconscious is the ceaselessly active, nonrational, childlike, playful dynamic of the self that we observe knowing the altered states of consciousness between sleeping and waking, between dreaming and "full" consciousness. It is the leading edge of the self, the fine point of the organism reaching out for union with the rest of reality.
It is, I think, the spirit of the self St. Paul had in mind when he said that the Spirit speak to our spirit — the self insofar as it is charmed and fascinated by the Ultimate as mediated by the good, the true and the beautiful of creation. It is where the Spirit encounters our spirit, seduces it, invites it to dance all night long, and then endeavors to hold it in thrall for ever and ever. Amen.
Ordinarily, these are the dynamics of our grace, hope, renewal experiences — processes in which God works through the secondary causes of the regular processes of experiencing and of giving name and meaning to the phenomena of life. I do not exclude the possibility of other models in which the Spirit whispers directly in our ear, models fondly loved by pious letter writers and by cardinals coming out of conclave. I merely assert with the Catholic tradition that ordinarily the Spirit enters the dance with our spirit through secondary causes and not through special direct intervention.
It is hard to describe this aspect of the self in a way that does not make it sound like a "part" of the self, a mental counterpart of an arm or a leg. But while the right hemisphere of the brain might be the locale of its activity, the dancing self is not a "faculty" of the self so much as it is a modality of the self — or more likely a collection of modalities, or "altered states," of different but related ways of knowing.
October 15th, 2009 at 8:32 AM
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