>It is our duty to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
> - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Which advice if taken literally could land one in a heap of trouble,
or possibly just a heap.
Funnily enough I was reading up on _Le Milieu Divin_ just the other
day. I have a fondness for what some would consider hopelessly
outdated and discredited ideas - they tend to come back into fashion,
just when you least expect it. The more babblesome end of the
"philosophy and psychology of cyberspace" seems to me to owe rather a
lot to Teilhard de Chardin.
Anyway, these are from _The Spirit Zone_, a sequence I wrote about
five years ago.
4.
What a time to go dragging religion in,
or through. I have never wanted so much
to believe in Teilhard's chastity, his noosphere
engirdling the earth in a close nimbus
of conciliation, as to find some other word
than wretched to describe the whole arena.
For Teilhard it is love's alchemy brought
to bear on love itself, virginity
reset amid corruption (type control -
alt - delete) that forms the catalyst
for our conversion. Not to get bogged down,
God forbid, in morbid details, but isn't there
something amiss in this phenomenal
account - some hidden scandal biding time?
5.
Back to the stumbling-block, the necessary
woeful impediment. See where the sandal
scuffed the stone, the inoffensive stub
peeping out of the dust. Teilhard devotes -
appropriately - an appendix to the matter:
the quantum or quotient of harm, per inch
of the way travelled. As humankind is hitched
to perfection, each loss is amortized
in advance; but as for all that trippy prose,
read theology as an art of tumbling, a fall
taken with comic grace. Or is that cosmic?
And isn't that mythology? Whatever
precipitously grazes and befouls us stands
in each case as its sovereign occasion.
Dominic
|