Love, Agnosticism and numinous - Mysterium Tremendum
I'd love to write something really inspiring or insightful right now but the truth is....I'm too tired:-)
Didn't sleep last night and I'm at work, alone since its Easter holidays and all the rest are on vacations.
I was reading Contact again for the millionth probable time again and as always there was something more there for me to find. I particularly noticed the following passage describing Ellie's relationship with Ken :
" She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his
presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his
love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better
because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of
infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At
least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so
many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken,it was gone.
She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of
memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but
fascinated. He would question her for hours about her childhood. His
questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception
gentle. she began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another.
There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children
inside her were permitted to come out. If the on-year-old, the five-year-
old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible
personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on. "
I have been looking for a way to describe this exact feeling for all past relationships, the good ones because the bad mostly do not make you feel good about yourself. And Carl Sagan does it amazingly in 2 paragraphs.
I do not think I have even encountered this person that all my different sub-personas can be happy with. I have always felt and still do that I need to be someone else and not who I actually am, because who I actually am is, truly, to hard to swallow.
I know this. I know what I am asking for is .... well.....at least my own equal if not more. And that, I know, is A LOT to ask for. And as Ellie says I am truly, honestly, most profoundly solitary in my world of 210 facebook friends. The circle of people I know is huge but I in it I cannot find someone to actually take all the burden of breaking into this solitude....
Now to do that of course he would have to be able to understand and appreciate that solitude for what it is and not try to rip it apart but gently stand beside it.
Being solitary...it is a choice you are driven to , a necessary choice that you cannot escape when you start evolving in a way uncommon to most people.
And it goes together with an enormous sense of compassion and love for humanity, with all its faults but all its wonderful dreams. As the Caretakers told Ellie it was Beethoven that gave them the hope in order to contact the human race.
All great works of art and of the mind for me inspire love and also a sense of the numinous, of misterium tremendum and so does science....for me. I do actually believe that the Andromeda Galaxy is as numinous as Botticelli's Venus, and possibly more.
I remember distinctly 2 separate occasions where I have experienced this sense of numinous......once in front of Monet's Venice (where for no apparent reason, while casually looking at the painting, my eyes watered, my chest felt as if it was going to explode and my mind was racing full of energy and hope and infinite sadness but also joy)
The other time I was alone, under a starlight sky without a moon, on a mountaintop in Pelio, gazing at the Milky Way. And as I stood and watched this sense of grandeur, this magestic, mysterium tremendum, filled my mind and my eyes and my legs faltered for a second and I braced myself full of joy and hope and - for only fragments of time - with my solitude lifted by something bigger than life.
The thing is....most of what I write about here are for most people mambo jumbo, waste of time etc etc. And for the rest , the very few rest, a very good way to insanity.
You see the vastness of space and the infinite of time can drive someone crazy when it is not accompanied with love. And it so seldom is.
Love makes the emptiness bearable. And I say love, not sex, not in love, no, pure unconditional love that says I love you for who you are, whatever you are, because you make my own perception of this delusional reality so much more beautiful and I want to make you happy in any way I can with no refunds because of who you are.
I would love to experience that.
Finishing I have to quote my beloved Carl Sagan again in what to me is the closest to religious experience I would ever hope to get :
" The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to
contact Eleanor Arroway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to
share the discovery.
The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 11 arithmetic, where it
could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had
been received from Vega, this could be at best a simple message, but its
statistical significance was high. The program reassembled the digits into
a square raster, an equal number across and down. The first line was an
uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a
single numeral one, exactly in the middle, with zeros to the borders, left
and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed,
composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly
constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last
line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one.
The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.
Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the
transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by
unities in a field of noughts.
The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy
you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle,
divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle
-- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There
would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like,
or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in
this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later
you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have
to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature
of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the
artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming
Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates
the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching
for."
People ask me why I call myself an agnostic and not an atheist, as if I do not hold the courage of my convictions. Still I consider myself a deeply spiritual person but...the data isn't in yet to formulate a meaningful answer. Carl Sagan said it, Asimov's Multivac said it and I say it......
And as for ever lasting love, I have to quote William Butler Yeats :
" You say there is no love, my love, Unless it lasts for aye. Ah, folly,
there are episodes Far better than the play."
Episodes, that makes us who we are , make us grow in our solitude in order to discover who we are to be able to reach the point where we come together with another person to protect and guard each other solitudes.
posted by Tatiana | 3:42 pm
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