A few years ago, I started a book of poetry which was to be translated into German (why not?). With the 2008 market realities hitting, my Greek translator and to be agent pulled out for obvious reasons and the book lay unwritten. The most interesting thing about the project was the title which I had given it ‘The Symphony Of Logos And Eros’ (looks better in German) using the Platonic meaning of logos to be logic. The book was to explore the conflict between one’s rational self and love the greatest of all irrationalities. To dispel the prominent notion that ‘love is blind’ I would like to say that love is not blind, rather it sees all in perfect vision and the cracks and flaws which come later are there and are seen but rather are accepted as part of the whole. It would be fairer to say that love is accepting.
Years later my thoughts developed further, no longer primarily concerned with love and logic in terms of girl/boy ‘intrigues’ but into the more abstract realms of the Divine. In this Logos became the Spinozian God which created everything but has no personal interaction and Eros the notion of the personal God to whom one prays for help on an intimate level.
Logically the notion that a higher power (God, mathematics, nothingness or whatever semantic palate you wish to choose) created everything and then sat back and said this is what I created, with its own laws (Newtonian, Einsteinian etcetera etcetera), and I will let these laws take place after all what is an individual life in comparison with the eternity which I am, myself? For us life is long/short depending on our perspective (and each day) but in a hundred years or so we will be gone and (probably) forgotten so what is a single life in the grand scheme of things?
Yet, personal experience has been interpreted, by me, to suggest that there is some form of higher power which intercedes on my personal behalf, not by making the world run for my whims but rather on the level of personal wellbeing. Indeed, my discovery (or being discovered by) this personal God at the age of 15/16 made me turn my back on churches and embark upon a personal quest into myself to find the source of this ‘voice’. However, logic would dictate that this ‘voice’ was not some external entity or ‘soul’ but rather what the Freudians would call ‘the unconscious mind’ something of me which is more me than me.
Here I find myself caught in the conflict between the emotional and the rational. Why would a God care about me individually? Likewise, as Christians I have met have told me and theologians have written, why would a God not care about my individual wellbeing for what is billions and trillions of individual people to the entity which created not only them but everything?!
I have no answers to this and, whilst I find the language of likes of Kierkegaard and St Augustine simpering and the language of Spinoza and Einstein more palatable, it remains that one of the greatest battles which one undertakes is not external (per se) but rather within one’s self and maybe the answers will come (if indeed answers are still sought) when one gives up the battle and lets the symphony of logos and eros wash over one’s self.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 