Friday, June 23, 2017

This be literature.

What if there was a God, so to speak, and one who would create a being of the same image.  That creatuure, man, let's say, would be thoroughly equipped to do the things of "God's work," just as he, or she, was.  Wouldn't need to be anybody other than who he was, just as he was.  He wouldn't do any particular career other than what came naturally to him and his two hands.  He wouldn't have to be a priest, not a doctor, nor a banker, nor a lawyer, though all of those too might share the image of "God" as well.   There wouldn't be much of that which is typically regarded as selfish.  He'd be kind, interested in the world, get sad when whales die with their guts full of plastic bags.   He'd look up to the night sky, enjoy a quiet street or a busy one, be glad for the simple things on Earth like trees, birds, animals, the natural paths of running water, and so forth.  He might well be, as Dostoevsky or Melville might have predicted in their physics of the soul, something of an idiot.  He'd be respected as a coworker for being a guy who got the job done, efficiently, without extra noise.  He'd recite The Lord's Prayer in a simple and earnest fashion out of respect for its own mathematics.  He'd rejoice in the success of people like Jacques Pépin.  He'd like to cook, because cooking is important.  He'd take joy in root vegetables, and, if he liked, cooking hamburgers with onion.  He'd like wine, and the company of those who also enjoy it, for that would mean that they too were from the image, the blueprint that is because it is, that which is, just the human being part of it all.

Would there be a childishness to him?  Would he be gullible, but outgrow that in time, while remaining as he was, nothing in particular, a server of wine, let's say.

He'd be arrested by, and disgusted with, images of violence and violence itself, even it meant what another more aggressive type of social being might consider losing face by not tending forth violence back.  Would there be an innocence to him?  Something off-putting, if you didn't know his overall plan which was also part of the pattern blown into the dust that made him, which he wouldn't consciously know himself as the expression about the left hand and the right hand.  Would he spout off such things as I write now?  No, he'd probably keep it pretty cool, and go about things without too much fanfare.  He would not claim to be an expert, but that rather all people know their tastes, their own inner knowledge, their own ability to discern what is placed before them.  Much like pouring a tasting of wine for people, giving them a basic vocabulary to which they will react.

He would already be doing what he was doing, and the question was merely letting the inner shine out, without any need for self-promotion.  This would seem like a problem to most people by their own good common sense.

But, as a father who was a teacher once explained to his son, there are throughout all history and space such types quietly going about their business in an enlightened fashion, sort of like the adepts who can finally come and go as they please through space and time.  "It's the same guy," he would say to his son, "who appears here as Moses, here as the Buddha, here as Jesus, showing up over and over again."  Thus, reincarnation.

The paradigm, the model, the pattern of divine image comes down to the things around him, the way he populates his life, the surroundings he is found in, his place of work.   And to him, just as so, things are well.  He would help the people he came into contact, just by being himself, as he was.

It is kind of a boring story, but one worth studying as a kind of taxonomy of human being and related animals.

In the timelines poetically representative of the natural life cycle of birth, life, death, he would be understood as a being.  In the end he would be regarded more or less simply as a person who noticed other people, gave them their due, endured himself and others with patience, forgiving of trespasses and sins as we all share, and take that as a moment, an opportunity, to learn, to study, to eventually try to bring better forward who he was and wanted to be.  If you met him on the street, he would be shy but friendly, humorous, but not over stepping bounds beyond showing that boundaries were sometimes unnecessary and even wrong, a matter of prejudging, a discrimination of the unnecessary and wrong kind.  One path of life is narrowing, a matter of specialization and then the training of sophistication.  But there is another, and it is broader, more general, like the lily and the sparrow, and perhaps it can be described as friendship, as in the friendship between chefs, brought together by good cooking, and also wine and a sense of humor.

That is why the old restaurant too can be within the pattern, taking on the role of peace maker, spreader of good will, education, the exchange of knowledge, the acknowledgement of sustenance and mortality.  and of course the old model of serving people  in the most direct and confidently humble way there is, though all of us share that.

I am not even a writer.  I am just trying to let it flow.  I could say I am self-taught, but that would not at all be true.  The real matter is that of finding what you are comfortable with as finding material.  There is a beauty in the simplicity of a plate.  Look how much joy can come along with it.


But if one came into the world, and managed from childhood on upward, manage somehow to not lose that connection with the image of "God," how, would we even be able to, would we recognize "him or her."  Where, in our system, that includes labels.  In the olden days, so strange was his appearance, they attributed some interesting stories to his presence, hearings, miracles, whether or not they happened, who knows.  Perhaps he jus didn't fit in quite so neatly.  How to understand, they would have asked.  There is of course evidence that the local authorities felt an upstart in their midst, claiming their own authority and even more beyond.  His friends and people who knew him would tell his stories, to reaffirm their claim of knowing him and being his friend, and as we all know, this is how folklore starts, continues and perhaps the stories grow, a bit of embellishment upon the truth.

There is left recorded some of the things the man might have actually said, and the people's basic sense that he was something of a teacher, "a rabbi," of some sort, and of which they approved.

What was the kernel of the story, beginning at the real core of it as happened in reality as a history, and then on outward into the common dreams of him and his acts.  People made a big deal out of it, and created and transcribed literature from it.

Where does that leave us, in understanding the "image of God,"  "the Son of Man."

Too much for our minds to even go there, without a queasy feeling of trespassing upon something.  Even if we too kind of get it, deep down, personally, without as much as peeping a word about it.  Reality has its own little cults, its own way of embellishment, of making something important, and then that important self-feeding.

It was all a reasonable myth, this person made in God's image.  More reasonable than other things that would come along....

The whole thing, what this guy comes up with, would be fresh and unpredicted, out of the blue.  It would therefore be a work of imagination, of the realizations that belong to the realm of art.  Unexpected eloquence, unexpected insight, unexpected kindness, unexpected action.  The story, itself, in a way, rather simple, thus allowing embellishment, verses, songs, imagery, retroactive to the beginning, reshaping the story's elements backward and forward, some of it a story-teller's justification, sometimes to further justify the story, to make the rough bones of it all make it in to the overall, to complete it with each step.

But this stuff is not made for making a thinker comfortable with.   There'd be more a feeling leftover by it of feeling "like sick man, an ill man."  Perhaps a necessary part of getting into the role of understanding, poking such a thing.  Cringe-worthy.

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