Goines On: Ethical qualms

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On his way to have blood drawn for his annual health exam, Goines recalled a horrible thought he had entertained when he ate that curried chicken the day before – of those helpless, innocent chickens caged up, overfed, injected with whatever, deprived of light and exercise (not to mention freedom), for the sole purpose of being eaten, or of laying eggs – and he grieved anew at their plight, wondering how frightfully they perceived it. Of course (or hopefully) not as frightfully as a human would perceive it, because a chicken’s brain didn’t seem capable of supporting the psychology. Psychology … the word’s root was psyche... soul.

Spirituality, a preface to

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded my post, "All in or All out," with the statement:

I do have at least one remaining question. It has to do with the distinction between religion and spirituality. As a noble doubter, I felt that I could "be spiritual" even though I found it ridiculous to try to "be religious." The question is: Now that I've opted for being all out when it comes to religion, is spirituality still an option for me, and what does that mean?

The initial, easy answer to the first part is yes. Any conscious being can "be spiritual"—for the simple reason that a conscious being is spiritual, and essentially so, I think.

The Greek word psyche ("breath," "life," "soul," "spirit") reveals the philosophic roots of consciousness as spirit. Introspection, as a branch of psychology dealing with one's own consciousness, can be understood as the study of spirituality, primarily of one's own personal spirituality.

In future posts I will attempt to elucidate this in order to understand better what I mean by it. I will also, of course, report on how satisfactory such a "study" of my own consciousness is in fulfilling my personal need to express my spirituality. I even want to discover how such a pursuit can answer my need to be connected to the world, to other creatures, to the Cosmos, for one need traditionally filled by religion is just that need to be connected. (The word religion, after all, has as its root meaning "to bind" or "be bound." Think of the words ligation, ligature...Perhaps my main gripe with religion has been its usual focus, as practiced in America, on being bound up with dogma and closed-minded, dogmatic people.)

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Yesterday I revised my blog profile and adjusted my masthead accordingly. Today, newly affirmed in my status as a nobody, I find myself in one of those moods of "not wanting to die just yet." I want to lounge and luxuriate for a while in the idyll of nobodiness. I want to start again and this time finish reading James Joyce's Ulysses (I've already begun) and re-read Hugh Kenner's books about Joyce and other American, Irish, and English modernists. Already, time seems to have slowed down for the enjoyment of these activities and for savoring, too, the most trivial acts of daily routine.

I happily discovered the other day that my sense that events in my life were now repeating themselves with accelerating speed was but a foolish illusion (and one that I'd have done better to reject than to accept and pay lip-service to—"Time is passing so fast!"). I discovered this upon examining how often it seemed to be that we were once again running the automatic dish washer. It had come to seem that the time between one running and the next was getting shorter and shorter. But I discovered that this impression was quite false and had been formed because I was focusing on the days when we ran the dish washer and ignoring the days we didn't run it. And there were more days we didn't run it than there were when we did. It was as though I had been ignoring the spaces between the notes of a melody. Ignoring the silences.

As I was warming up my computer moments ago, I opened Kenner's own book titled Ulysses and, reading its thematic quotation (from Plato's Republic), felt a tremor:

And it was a sight worth seeing to behold the several souls choose their lives. And a piteous and a laughable and amazing sight it was also. The choice was mostly governed by what they had been accustomed to in their former life...
      It so happened that the soul of Odysseus came forward to choose the very last of all. He remembered his former labours and had ceased from his ambition and so he spent a long time going round looking for the life of a private and obscure man. At last he found it lying about, ignored by every one else; and when he saw it he took it gladly, and said that he would have made the same choice if the lot had fallen to him first.
            – Plato, The Republic, X-620, trans. A. D. Lindsay

What to make of this "synchronicity"? How did it happen that the first words that fell under my eye should be so perfectly apt? Mere chance? No, I don't think so. Angelic intervention, then? Again, no, I don't think so...unless the angels that intervene in our lives are the wraiths that emanate from our own psyches and hover around us continually. The haunting mists we saw shrouding the Vermont hills two weekends ago come to mind. There weren't any the day I took the photo below; alas, I had been too agog of the mists the days before to think then of photographing them.

I'll be glad to think of my psychic wraiths as "angels," for I am well-disposed toward angels and it's comforting to think that I can have them in my life still, even though I seem at last to have succeeded in cleansing my belief of "God."

For I had read this book by Kenner a few years ago, including of course the thematic quote. In fact, I had read Plato's Republic many years ago (Edith Hamilton's translation), and it is conceivable (if improbable) that the passage struck a chord with me even then—even though I don't think that the young man I was then was looking forward to becoming nobody:

And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.

I'm glad today, and determined to be glad tomorrow, for the silences in my life....