Experience

Why is 'to labour' the same as 'to suffer'? Why do you have to be 'compensated' for work?

The idea that we could actually derive pleasure or find meaning in the work we do is a joke for most of us, just as is the idea that we could make something beautiful. An old socialist theme (Sennett, Morris...)

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

There's something wonderful about the tone and rhythm of the writing. The thought of a shared life, of contributing to the common good, of participating a tradition or way of life that is as old as our human gestures. Must read Primo Levi's The Wrench now.

~~~

Contrast this with teaching at the uni. where the so-called 'life of the mind' means you don't actually produce anything tangible, with your hands, or anything that engages your whole personality. And a mind that is passionate about 'ideas' can easily become unhinged unless it finds expression in real life. The 'life of the mind' is only one form of intelligence and the dangers of one-sidedness are legion.

Secondly, the so-called 'community of scholars' (assuming it exists in pakiland, which it doesn't) doesn't really get to the heart of what the word 'community' means. One might as well be a monk. But even monks or ascetics can belong to an order!

Which, in a strange way, brings me back to something in the last post: what is a religious experience, and can we have one without religion? That sounds slightly blasphemous but is that only because our habits of mind and of speaking have for too long associated the experience with particular religious forms? And isn't the 'Protestant failing' always just lurking behind the corner? Without forms, institutions, receptacles,tradition, bridges, dogma does the lawless heart find itself not seeing beauty and meaning everywhere, in the ordinary, but quite the opposite: a world that is emptied of any significance, drained of any warmth? God, from now on is an infinitely distant God and grace and revelation lose their connection to worldly affairs? Isn't that the kind of 'gnosticism' the Pope was alluding to (even as he (mistakenly) tied it up with the notion of the so-called arbitrary Will in Islam).

Dewey. Yes. Time permitting.

The closest thing I've had to a 'religious experience' (and that begs the question: why call it 'religious'?) is in the presence of Rothko's dark paintings. Goya at the Prado seemed too historical. Here was something else, pointing to the timeless.

[I know that some of the more doubting readers of this blog were expecting my religious experience to refer to cinnamon rolls but, well, yes...there are some things that cannot, simply cannot, be talked about! :-) ]