Written Friday night around 9:25 PM EDT: I’m currently about 30,000 feet in the air, having left Boston behind about fifty minutes ago. I’m not thinking about Boston. On the contrary, I’m losing myself in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Sonic Youth’s Murray Street. I’ve just finished reading Chapter 33 in the section called “Hesed,” in which the narrator Casaubon describes the taking of his girlfriend Amparo in a Brazilian syncretic rite of possession by spirits, while listening to “Rain on Tin” and drinking a glass of American Airline’s “house merlot.” Powerful syncretic ingredients, these. You find yourself drawn in…
I’ve always done this, seeking explanation or maybe escape in external sources when major things like life changes are happening. Maybe that’s why I’m a link-pointing blogger. It’s not enough to proceed from first causes, what you yourself know, like those diarists with their LiveJournals; you have to connect yourself syncretically to everything around you. Maybe that’s the difference between Radio users and other bloggers. We aggregate, synthesize, syncretize right out of the box.
As Eco’s narrator says at the beginning of Chapter 34:
Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of a bellows.
“God’s asthma,” Belbo glossed.
Good man, that Belbo. He’s a born blogger. Give him a login on Instapundit.
The sunset and two twenty-something sarcastic youths are in the seats to my right; the window and the wing beyond, and darkness, to my left. Ahead the West Coast, my vocation (or is it an avocation?), behind the East Coast, my roots and my life to date.
I am breathing clearly, no anxiousness at all. Am I still creating?