tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4640470443420164863.post8534481024687378643..comments2024-03-26T10:26:51.288-04:00Comments on Jim Leff's Slog: Angels From Both PerspectivesJim Leffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00007232702717055047noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4640470443420164863.post-56764857071695216652015-12-04T21:45:09.493-05:002015-12-04T21:45:09.493-05:00Thanks for posting. I love David Foster Wallace, b...Thanks for posting. I love David Foster Wallace, but I can't get through his stuff. Every sentence or two, my mind fills with ideas and I have to put the book down ands pursue creative thought streams. DFW is like an extreme catalyst for me, so I doubt I'll ever finish a book of his. This saddens me.<br /><br />"God" is a red herring. We feel like we know what we're talking about when we use the term - when we drop the name - yet it's a concept only atheists really seem to have pinned down. For them, god is a bearded dude sitting on a cloud who obviously can't possibly exist. Easy-peasy! The rest of us get a little blurry, which is perfectly okay (Further reading: http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2011/05/cave-of-forgotten-dreams.html )<br /><br />I wrote of "deeper awareness", and that's also a bit blurry. You can use other names, but when you start naming things, you turn them into concrete things, and, before you know it, you've turned subtle, abstract, non-verbal things into bearded dudes sitting on clouds.<br /><br />I kept hammering on the extreme non-remarkability of what I'm talking about, and the problem with "God" is that we've made him remarkable. And, as I said at the end, remarkable stuff is just drama and hoo-haw. Just stuff.<br /><br />Re: "the agency of human beings", if you spend time asking yourself what IS this human being (i.e. "Who am I?"), you will eventually become familiar with deeper awareness. Things get less and less remarkable as more and more remarkable things happen. From there, it's pointless to postulate about "human beings", "God", and free agency. Just let go into the flow of it all, whatever you call it. <br /><br />And you'd be foolish to call it anything, because you can name only stale snapshots of the flow; the flow itself is just flow, and there's not much to remark about it. <i>You can't name it.</i><br /><br />This reply may appear to be a chopped salad of random thoughts and fuzzy connections. That's intentional. Anything straightforward I might say would be remarkable - dissectable, discussable, and ultimately comprehensible. Not flow, but stale snapshot. Jim Leffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00007232702717055047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4640470443420164863.post-9230418713149191022015-12-04T21:16:10.785-05:002015-12-04T21:16:10.785-05:00Jim,
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite je...Jim,<br /><br />David Foster Wallace's "Infinite jest" has a number of set pieces of writing. one of them is titled [roughly] "Things You Might Learn if you Ever Spend Time in a Halfway House."<br /><br />it's typical -- in fact, I would say "archetypical" Wallace: the Theater of lists, one sharp observation after another , many startling, informative, many silly or trivial, and of course he just casually drops in those little bomblets that make the whole thing worth reading carefully.<br /><br />The point of this being that <br /><br /><i>"...you may discover...that there are no actual angels but that there are people who might as well be angels...[......]...that if God does indeed choose to touch the earth, that he acts entirely through the agency of human beings...."</i>fbjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17520329647882641717noreply@blogger.com