Talking Tuesday: Master and His Emissary

 

In his latest substack newsletter, Rod Dreher writes about Iain McGilcrist's work on the brain, and McGilcrist's observation that Western culture has prioritized left brain dominance over balance with the right to great detriment.  (McGilcrist's work is dense, but this short video is a great overview).  Basically, says Gilcrist, the right side of the brain is the master, because it sees big picture, makes lots of different sorts of connections, and is creative but can be prone to madness.  

The left brain must be the emissary of the right so that both sides work together for an experience of reality which deals with the tangible and rational, but also lives in spiritual reality, the amorphous realm of mystery that we can only glimpse in slivers from time to time, because a view of the whole would be too much for us.  Our mystics and seers are ones who get to see more of that realm and live in it more fully than we.  They give us a window on it.  

Left brain dominance cannot see the forest for the trees; it is a kind of tunnel vision that not only thinks itself the master, but no longer perceives the presence of the right brain and is insistent that such a thing cannot exist.  To put it another way, it's like a tree in the middle of the forest sees only itself, and is blind to the fact that it is part of a forest, a larger ecosystem of reality. 

Writes Dreher:

"Reading McGilchrist [IM], it seems to me that the experience of consciousness is like what quantum physics tells us about reality: that it is both wave and particle. We live within a wave field that only becomes particle-ized through observation. When the left brain wishes to fix on something to understand it, it isolates the thing, but what it sees is only a partial picture of reality, because it denies the wave context (and has to, in order to see the particle). Yet a purely right-brain perception of reality cannot perceive the reality of the particle in isolation, so it too provides only a partial picture of reality. The truth is, living in time, we can never fully apprehend reality. But we can know it through participating in it.

IM quotes Herbert McCabe: “When we speak of God, we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery.”"  ~Rod Dreher, "Detaching the Limpet," Daily Dreher Substack newsletter, September 18, 2021.

I've been thinking about these sorts of things all year.  What does it mean to live in the balance of the left and right brains?  How do we participate in the mystery of reality that is not tangible?  How do we orient our telos such that it reflects these things, and what does that mean for day to day living?  

I have no pat answers, but I suppose the questions are perhaps an orientation toward understanding.  It's maddening sometimes, like I have a shine of something important in the corner of my eye that I can't quite make out, but when I try to look directly at it, it disappears.  But maybe that is the point--one cannot approach these things head on, but can only sidle up to them from an angle, hoping for a sliver of insight.

On Birth, Death, & Resurrection

I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth for a while, and appreciate his unique voice.  His substack is well worth the subscription.  He is a recent convert to Orthodox Christianity, from a place of atheism; I find the ways that he writes about our humanity very insightful.  Last week, Kingsnorth was interviewed by Jonathan Pageau, another very interesting Orthodox thinker and artist.  One of Pageau's preoccupations is in reading the symbols and rituals in our culture in the context of re-enchantment, which dovetails nicely with my own interest in the subject. 

Image via Uncut Mountain Supply

What I like about Pageau and Kingsnorth is that while they are clear-eyed about the changes in our world, they do so with a hopeful eye to the future, thinking of the birth of something new to come.  They bear in mind the basic human frailty and weakness in the face of passions.

Kingsnorth writes:

"...the useful work now seems to me to be that outlined by [Joseph] Campbell: to conquer death by birth. ...[T]he correct response to a rootless, lost or broken society is ‘the growing of roots’... Pull up the exhausted old plants if you need to - carefully, now - but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds. 

This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a civilisation that is already gone... To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires - fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths - and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

But first, we are going to have to be crucified." 

~The Faustian Fire, Abbey of Misrule Substack, Paul Kingsnorth, April 28, 2021

Image via Uncut Mountain Supply

It seemed a fitting thing on this day of Mystery: Holy Thursday.  A reminder to set our eyes on the road before us.  This morning we relive the establishment of the Mystical Supper in the Eucharist, and tonight we will go through the Passion with Christ in the Twelve Gospel readings.  Tomorrow, we sit at the foot of the cross and lament while we await the third day resurrection.    

"Today, He who hung the earth upon the waters is suspended upon the tree."~Matins of Holy Thursday

The thing I come to at the end of this Великий пост is that the road is long and I am weak and careworn. 

I am counted amongst the foolish women, forgetting to fill my lamp and missing the feast of the Bridegroom.  I am Simon Peter, declaring my love and then betraying it before the cock crows. I am Gestas, the thief who mocked Christ even as he hung from his own cross.  I am ever Thomas, fighting with my doubts in the face of the Risen Lord.  

Dismas and Gestas, 16th century Kievan icon

But I am also the publican who beat his breast in the corner of the temple, asking God's mercy for his sins.  I am Dismas, the thief on the cross who begged mercy in his final hour.  

I am a lumpen stone on the Sculptor's anvil, and the blows of His hammer can shape me into something better.

Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

(1 Corinthians 15:51-53)