coldhearted scientist وداد

Elena Garro returned as a writer after being silenced and then resisting this imposition through the deployment of an active silence, over a period of thirteen years. That is inspiring. However, Rip van Winkle woke up after sleeping for twelve years, and I have been comparing my sleep of Reeducation to his. This blog points out that despite the flaws of that patriarch Odysseus, the story of a return voyage – as we already knew from Joseph Campbell, had we remembered – is a better parallel. From reading fairy tales, I had always had the impression that heroes and heroines, although they did get lost geographically, become imprisoned, or dawdle along eating lotus, still kept their wits about them. I have just realized that they do not, and that this is one of the most essential points of these stories. They get truly lost, and the dragons they battle are neither so benign, nor so noble as Beauty’s Beast.

It seems that the reason religions so strongly emphasize submission to the will of God is that they intend to undo submission to false authorities. Reeducation, however, did the opposite: it kept telling us to renounce our own intuition in favor of a cartoonish “God.” We were constantly exhorted to renounce “self-will” and to give up believing we could know ourselves. What we thought we wanted, for instance, could not be what we really wanted. It could only be what we mistakenly thought we wanted. Nobody imagined that our wills could already be grooving with our deepest selves and, of course, the spirits. Had I met any cult-like religions before, I might have recognized their features in Reeducation. But Reeducation purported to be secular, even if it was culturally Christian.

And it seems to me that many Christians also understand their churches but not their god. But I can deconstruct Reeducation in conservative Christian terms. I would say it recommended an excess of attachment and anxiety, and called meditative calm and confidence (sorry, I mean “faith”) a deficiency of feeling. It prescribed stagnation and fetters, and called that “serenity.” But even in the conservative Christian world, the WINE of serenity and detachment can be accompanied by the BREAD of progression and freedom (see this strange but instructive diagram). If my underdeveloped being could see this, how is it that persons claiming a high level of development and a great depth of faith could not?

Axé.