Points on the Circumference of a Circle

Or, will mushrooms love?

The creative animation of our time, with its dwarfed bodies and pinpoint-pupils to its general effort to revel and roll in an increasing debasement of matter, bears consideration for the Confession that it is. This debasement cannot stop itself from annihilating ever more of itself because it is rooted in the soul-sick disorder of the urge to reject order (Names and Meanings). It crystallizes around the urge simply to break increasingly more basic taboos because that is what progress for progress’s sake always must be: going for its own sake, thus deprived of orientation and so sinking into its own mire.

In particular Yeerk P has been making a point of how edgy-creative media dehumanizes its consumers, trapping them in pathological therapeutic language; and, at its most tellingly confessional, continually centers a "fungal" synthesis as its idealization.

This desire for electrified slime, a self-annihilating ant hive orgy, is the zenith of libertarian-transhumanist-materialist dreams; yet only a few decades ago the Borg collective was highlighted as the dread endpoint of Totalism. Much has changed; or, perhaps, the consequences of various first principles have been made consistent. The angry 45 year old sets out to direct ugly art aimed at children, Yuval Harari works to justify the death of Man’s Consciousness. The Borg becomes slime, the slime becomes Borg: either way, Spirit, Freedom, and Love are hoped to be defeated at last.

It was with those thoughts in the background of my mind that my reading of a new collection of Owen Barfield essays, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” found point meeting point and coming alive. In particular the essay “Equity” highlights the lazy nihilism of these aspirational regressions. Barfield uses his favorite poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to redirect the consciousness by awakening the heart:

“Self-consciousness is made possible only by the voluntary recognition of another self-consciousness. It becomes possible when, by an act of free will, we resist the impulse to regard other human beings as mere phenomena, as mere points on the circumference of a circle; and it is developed in us at any moment only to the extent that we are able to acknowledge with our whole heart that these others too are centres, centres of equal status with ourselves. In Coleridge's words, we must 'negative their sameness in order to establish their equality.'" [Emphasis in original] 

This bears repeating: 'Negative their sameness in order to establish their equality.' Why, all recent history going back to The French Revolution has used precisely the opposite strategy: to make positive their sameness to establish a poisoned hierarchy of slime consuming slime, slime oppressing slime, slime hating slime. All our leveling has only made our identities more vicious because they are all the less real. Cornered by the homogenizing impulse, we lash out and seek reality in our victimhood. Maybe we are the same, but I am different because I believe you Hate me, and so I may Hate you with righteous Hate.

The idea we could be different, and thus in our very difference find the ground for conscience, consciousness, and eventually our communion, is the possibility every ideologue and power-seeker has worked to blot out. But it is true and it is the hope of the world. You and I are not alike, and that is the gift which will enable us to truly love one another. 

You are not a fungus. There has been Love and Strife. Difference leads to sin when we reject the task of love and seek the death of responsibility by returning to the primordial matter. When Difference is received as a gift (and Barfield provides the key with his line “Only one religion has ever taught that God is to be sought in the Ego of another man, and that religion is Christianity,” emphasis in original) then we are Free to move away from the self-hating incestuous slime polycule to the Communion of the Saints, who are always gloriously different and In Love. Through their love of God’s face they receive their own.

God has seeded the living and conscious mirrors (yes, living and conscious!) of His face in the ancient matter of Creation. He suffered on the Cross so the slime mold would begin to grow a Heart, a Voice, Eyes, a Mind, a Face. Yes, it is the most tragic confession in the world that many of these souls could revel in rejecting this gift so as to be slime, to be robots quantifying quickly.

We are meant to become a face. Mystery upon Gift upon Mystery. Praise to God everlasting, Word unsurpassed.

Max Picard, author of “The Human Face”