Forcing Self into Theory
I was reading around here and another blog mentioned this Joanna Field quote and the the Adam Phillips book / talk on "giving up". I have both of these on by bookshelf and have been reconsidering these in light of my other conversations this week. Some notes:
forcing the self into a theory
“So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote "it will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it's the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory." — Joanna Field
on giving up
I also listen to a podcast by or with Adam Phillips on the importance of giving up. I feel like that idea helps nullify the "self theory” and opens you up to new experience and the metamorphosis. Rilke: you must change your life. Or: die, fail, and be changed.
realizing we have missed it, until the end
When we read the symposium together this week or last week, we kind of came to a breakthrough I believe, which was entertaining and enjoyable with to do it with others, and started off by talking about what the words for love were in in the text, but it kind of moved onwards about how though words were being expanded or extended, and then we started to talk how the concepts of love in general we're being bent and stretched until we get to the speech of diastema where it's about being birthed into beauty.
I think we kind of all realized at that point that Plato is not trying to argue for various propositional truths, but he's trying to create a text of some kind that gives us this experience of being birthed into beauty, which is a sort of a erotic experience. It's strange and the text is strange because it is doing more than giving us ideas about love. It's trying to create an erotic pull towards a love of beauty and virtue.
we are given a glimpse
after, we had a conversation about it and there were some that said “I've missed so much. Like after three years of reading I feel like I've missed a lot -- I didn't get what I should I have gotten out of these texts." Another person said: yes, but this is maybe the point? That we after all of this can catch a glimpse or catch sight of wisdom and that she was for that.
I was thinking a lot this week about grasping things and taking a whole life to finally come to a realization of some small truth and was wondering: could that be life's project? Like we do all this stuff — we raised children, we earn money, we seek housing, we eat food, but maybe through all of that — and I believe that all of those things have kind of a metaphoric value — all of these things kind of point to something we are meant to see before we go?
Speaking of birth, Paul in the New Testament kind of uses those metaphors like birth frequently.
I am suffering, labor pains… Until Christ is formed in you…
Christ _in you, _the hope of glory .
… I became your father through the gospel… .
Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God
pregnancy, and birthing into beauty
What is being born? What is this pregnancy that we are only now realizing we are carrying? Our projects, jobs, careers? I wonder if failure and giving up is integral for this thing to be born, for us to experience what we need to experience, to see what we need to see.
Not seeing it yet, the lack that we feel, the gap, the desire to close and complete, this is our workmate Eros, pulling us out of the failed theory of ourselves and into reality, into God.
Atthis, your care for me stirred hatred in you and you flew to Andromeda. (LP, fr. 131)
Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it. — Ann Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
Galatians 4:19 Colossians 1:27 First Corinthians 4:15 first Corinthians 1:24