julie mehretu

"god, and what is meant by god, can only be grasped when we surrender our own conceptual understanding to the ineffable and holy mystery which lies hold on us as the mystery which is near to is and which embraces us in love."  karl rahner

are these opposites imagined too?  maybe if i could take a few more steps backward, i could then understand  things a little bit better. 

k

"experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall." (annie dillard, pilgrim at tinker creek)

maybe material is the closest we can come to reality.  dillard's pilgrim at tinker creek seems to draw a strong correlation between focus on the senses and living in the present.  she talks about seeing things, feeling things, tasting.  certainly you cannot forget yourself without focus on something outside of your own identity, but it seems like material might not be the most productive aspect of life to chose to celebrate. 

the main point that she makes about living in the present is that it requires innocence, and that thinking is a corruption of our ability to experience truth.  (i may be taking a few liberties with my paraphrase.)  she talks about how children have to be told that colorful leaves in the the fall are beautiful; the idea that those leaves might be more beautiful than something else had not occurred to them because it is all beautiful and engaging in their mind. 

if nature exists as a representation of truth, it seems like constructing and relying on any ideas about what this material means might just be another removal!  emerson says in one of his essays, "the tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again."  the most real thing we can experience (though not real itself) is material.  god is intangible.  material is once removed.  our ideas about material are twice removed. 

i'm not sure i buy it. 

k