We all take pleasure in the satisfaction of appetites. But, occassionally, we take a step back and notice that those satisfactions as satisfactions are conditions of duress, compulsions in the most literal sense. Take another step back and life itself appears as something forced upon us against our will. These encounters with the unwilling horizon of will are nauseating. Thus, my lunch-induced thoughts this pleasant afternoon. And, somehow, Adam and Eve came to mind--uninvited. We think of them (and I am not proselytizing, but considering a myth) without want locked up there in their garden. All the fruits of the trees, all the luscious nakedness. But if their every need were satisfied, they were not free of want. What, then, is the fall? The recognition of want: want as pain? And is that not just disillusionment?
A monk had attained enlightenment and was striving to describe to his Master the ecstasy that he had been in for the last few days. The Master replied, "Ah! Something else to let go."
The things that you're liable to read in the Bible. ain't necessarily so. Since there never was an Eden, why bother trying to analyze it?
why bother trying to analyze it?
Since it's a myth it speaks of the human condition and is, as such, worthy of analysis.
The word apple, in English, used to refer to any round fruit such as a pomegranate or a norange.
It speaks only of the interpretation of life formed by a very wise man or group of men, who knew so little about the world around them that their opinions about it were necessarily hopelessly flawed.
More than just a fruit, an apple was used to signify sweetness.. a very desirable thing-- since humans are born with a taste for sweetness.
in the days before cheap sugar, apples represented sweetness,-- and sweetness was the essense of desire...
see The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World" Michael Pollen, (pub. by Random house.) for essay on the subject.
> The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World" Michael Pollen
well there's an aptronym for you.
Tibetan and Zen Bhuddism were completely separate for, I don't know, thousands of years. The professors at Harvard (I believe (a lot of "believes" herein, no doubt)) decided it would be fun to bring a master of each tradition to a seminar. They thought the ensuing discourse would be a delight and very much the thing for wine and cheese in the aftermath. Well, these traditions are rather different. Zen is more severe, and its practitioners like to cast doubt like a ratan cane on everything. Came the evening and the masters were seated opposite each other. The Zen master held an orange out before the Tibetan and demanded, "What is this?" When the Tibetan didn't answer, the Zen master demanded again, "What is this?" And so on. Finally the Tibetan took the orange and said, "It's an orange, don't you have them where you come from?"
embellished from hazy memory
Dear Inselpeter: If those were the Masters, God help the disciples.
<<Dear Inselpeter: If those were the Masters, God help the disciples.>>
Dear wwh:
Not Glory or nothingness
But air, sweet air!
And model planes
To dance in it their revelry
Wisened men
And blank-slate boys
affection and wonderment
IP
<<Since there never was an Eden, why bother trying to analyze it?>>
Besides that the story still speaks to many, is embedded in our culture, it is, in its raw experience, distant as my polished tooth to roast beef on my plate. Not far off at all from the nausea of my need to eat it.* Most of us work from duress, even those who think they do it willingly. We endure tedium and brutality for the right to have something in our mouths. Then, how different?
*or something.
Beside that, whether the bible stories are valid as models of understanding to us now, the idea that they might be invalidated per se is--or, should I say, I wonder if it might be--a product of our model of understanding, bound as it with our belief in progress. Whether these stories relate a model of the world that you, or I, can accept is irrelevant to their validity as a working model in their time: they did work. Or was the dawn of agriculture, of civilization, nothing but the black night of complete ignorance?
As a Darwinist Evolutionary (which rides quite happily with my persona as a Kropotkinist Revolutionary!) I naturally repudiate the reality of all of these creation-myths.
However, their prevalence in so many belief systems makes it likely, at the very least, that there is a deep need among humankind for some sort of explanation of Life, the Universe, etc etc which cannot be satisfied with an answer like "42".
You ask "What is The Fall," Inselpeter: I don't believe that there actually was one, but that there is a need to believe that there was once something, which we have now lost, that was better than the vale of tears and anguish in which we have arrived, in order that we may strive to recreate that primordial age of innocence and peace.
If that is what it takes to drive us along the road towards such a goal, then I would subscribe to it.
But the cynic in me does wonder if we - the human race - could ever agree on what constitutes an "Age of Innocenec and Peace."
<<reality, the fall, the need to believe in an age of innocence>>
Of course, I'm with you, mostly. Asking, "what is the Fall," I'm wondering what, given the inherent logic of the story, is it communicating--or I am offering an alternative which better fits my slug-of-Park-Avenue sensibility. I don't bring it up with any first-person urgency. But the urgency of being thrown into the world and too cowardly to throw one's self back out of it is certainly [a] fundamental urgency that is experientially expressed... .
As to "reality," the term, as we use it is quite modern and belongs to a recent model, or mode of apprehending or forming the world. While other modes or models may be invalid within the one whose principle is empirical validity (there's a place for attack!) tends to make us deny them as legitimate on their own terms and in their own time. I don't mean passing for valid, I mean valid. For example, it is generally accepted that petroleum comes from bio mass; there is a competing theory according to which it is a mineral oozing up from somewhere deeper in the Earth. As far as I know, the latter has not been disproven. Either theory is adequate to our interest in petroleum as something useful. It is possible that all our drilling takes place in an incorrect theoretical environment, but, event if that's the case, that environment produces what we want it to. This isn't a great example but the issue, it seems to me, will always be the adequacy of an expression to that which it expresses. I'm gonna cut this "short" here.
In reply to:
The word apple, in English, used to refer to any round fruit such as a pomegranate or a norange.
Faldage, can you expand on this a bit? Do you know when "apple" changed from meaning a round fruit to a fruit of the malus pumila? I'm guessing that the change coincided with the introduction of the malus pumila into the diet, but of what culture? Given the Biblical reference, post-King James? Or does the change go back further, since Germans are well acquainted with apfel malus pumila? If the apple is so recently domesticated, is it new world?
Many thanks.
In reply to:
> The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World" Michael Pollen
well there's an aptronym for you.
Leaf it to tsuwm: what a pistil. He has planted the seeds of an entire subthread. I shall not stamen, since I see no way to stem the tide, and stigma threatens.
Faldage might have more, but quoting from the essay:
"In fact, the Bible never names "the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden," and that part of the world is too hot for apples, but at least since the Middle Ages northern Europeans have assumed that the forbidden fruit was an apple. (Some scholars think it was a pomegranate.) Like a botanical Zelig, the apple has wormed its way into our image of Eden through the brushwork of Durer and Cranach and countless others. After their pictures, re-creating a promised land anywhere in the New World without apple trees would have been unthinkable."
The essay also touch on apples (and cider) as being not being associated with grapes/wine and papism. Unlike wine, which the old testament warned against the temptations of, cider was sin and guilt free!
Apples originate in Kazakhstan--and the old silk route passed through the forests-- so apples have been in europe for ages and ages..
Blue is a direct quote, copied out, green is not direct quote, but from the aritcle.
Imagine! A guilt free desire!
Imagine! A guilt free desire!No, i can't imagine. Nice thought, though
[too much time as a RC e]