How real I am; such an intensity of existing. It surprises me that Descartes based his existence on thinking rather than simply the avalanche, the torrent of pre-thought feeling. Somehow or other he used doubt to undermine his exuberance for life and decided that his thought must take precedence. If Socrates had his absences, when he would stand “lost” in thought, apparently absent from the world about him, then would he retain awareness of his body. Was his “lost in thoughtness” more real to him than his physical existence? To what degree do I know what his absences might have felt like? You see I bring feeling into it. Feeling I see as being more embodied than thought. Does thinking necessarily fight its way up towards abstraction. And because of our love of hierarchy which determines that up is better than down, heaven is up there somewhere and hell always down beneath us. The body that will be buried in the earth, to rot, to break down in a riot of bacterial joy. Perhaps the soul or spirit freed from its burden flies free up into the heavens. The upward march towards ever greater rationality and abstraction reached excitable heights in the so-called enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from our perch in the early twenty first century we can see the rocks that the great ship hit in the twentieth. I rest awhile on my ledge and survey the damage and crushed hopes with the rest of my fellow survivors with a sage nod to the orgy of consumerism and economic growth which knows no end.
What will be born out of this? What use will I be? This individual being well on into his life span, more drawn to contemplation than activism. There was this phrase that comes to mind from the sixties/seventies, if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. Dodgy . . . in those days it was enough to be young to see oneself as part of the solution. It can be seen that being old is necessarily to be part of the problem. But we never know where the solutions are going to come from. When he was elected Pope, Papa Francesco, said that the Church had to come to the ends of the earth of find him. And that’s the sense now, the solutions are going to emerge from the most unexpected quarters.
That could be a reason to be hopeful.
