Revered by the local Aboriginal people, Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) is a magnificent rock formation emerging from the red sands of the Australian center. This reverence has recently passed from the local groups to all of the Aboriginal peoples of the land. Run by Aboriginal people as a national park/tourist site, one is confounded by a series of contradictions not the least of which is that tourists are asked not to climb to the top of the outcrop while offering a route to the top complete with grab ropes for stability. Is the sacred confused with human greed?
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In a sense, the absolute and overwhelming alterity of the Absolute Other, the ineffable, that which is beyond all definition, reason and knowledge is translated into the truthful worship of that which cannot be defined and the existence of which cannot be known except by faith. Standing under the dome at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome one cannot help but be swept up in the grandiosity of what knowing the absolute Truth must produce. An old photographer’s maxim goes something like this, If you can’t make it good, make it big. This seems to hold true when building monuments to particular beliefs taken only on faith. If time is an illusion of instants or moments of existence, each instant exists without the ability to predict the next, each one exists with no past and no future, then what is to keep me from falling into the subjective trap of excessive solipsism. Levinas proposes the solution to which I am drawn. He argues that without the alterity of the other I could not escape from the confines of subjectivism turned inward. Alterity is recognized in the self only through the appearance of the other; gazing upon the face of the other allows one to gaze upon the simulacrum of the face of the Absolute Other. I believe, as Levinas suggests, that there is no predestination. If there were one would, of logical necessity, have no possibility of what the religious tend to call free will. If the outcome is already a fact unrealized then all of the actions leading up to the outcome must be scripted. What a dull universe this would be. I recently wrote, “Learning to appreciate the difference is, it seems, a way of suggesting a larger universe comprised of diverse elements surviving in a completely random predictable universe.” I believe that the idea of a completely random predictable universe requires a bit of expansion so that one does not get lost in the apparently paradoxical language. Once again I travel no further than my own front yard to capture this image of a sunflower shedding its pollen. Searching the world over for something that is already there creates a sense of hopelessness, like searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because it (whatever the search is for) is never there. Ishmael makes this prayer at the end of a rather lengthy dissertation on how long it took to build cathedrals in Europe, how many people were engaged in the building, and how many generations that worked on the project did not live to see its completion. What is captured in this seemingly cynical prayer is the essential element of embracing the moment, the now of existence, in order that one live one’s life to the fullest. And so it goes. Wasting time on that which one cannot control is what gets one in serious trouble. Life is lived in the context of the local, the people with whom one interacts, the places one goes, the thoughts one has, the moments to which one is privy. What takes place outside of the local is merely a narrative that one may choose to take seriously or not. Before one takes a macro-narrative seriously, however, one must settle the micro-narrative; embracing the moment of existence is a not so subtle way of such an embracing of one’s private narrative. |
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