Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
And Selected Prose,
Ed. Sculley Bradley
Holt, Rinehart, And Winston, Inc.
1949
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Cosmic Culture (TM) | |||||||||||||||||||||
| ...continued from | |||||||||||||||||||||
| <medical contrasted with personal or transpersonal or...> | |||||||||||||||||||||
| If all the laws of life and being are absolutely extant in medical culture (or privy to its own particular process of inquiry) and equally manifest or individualized in the physiology (or the perception thereof), then the application of merely medical philosophy and science should be sufficient for the whole individual who is therefore expected to find an reciprocal 'healthful' response (in body and body-identity) through the medically ordained limits of life and being, or Life and Death, 'Thanatos', son of Night, being the personage or 'pathology' of Natures changing shapes and mysterious motive only ever revealed to Self and its Conversation - Spirit, Breath, Energy, Love.) | |||||||||||||||||||||
| This might be helpful (in terms of the whole person, who like any science never truly stands alone) if the medical institution had arrived at its unconscious cosmogony or diagnostic protocal (and consequent subterfugal system of valuation and evaluation or material ontology) without imposing its own prejudices and preconceptions towards the ontology of biology (Eros) and language (Logos) (for nor has any science completely succeeded in reducing consciousness to biology since such would entail a dialectic that does not and cannot be reduced or raised, created or destroyed, a dialectic that is already in existence in the profound immediacy of Nature's imminent Self-Bounded relationship with Itself, implying again strongly that consciousness, like the Feminine Soul, is irreducably imminent to cultural ritual, its locus, romance, being, like relationship, the highest order of Knowing) - that is to say, if the medical institution had not arrived where it believes its authority to be relevant without imposing its own unique prejudices upon the body (or its own body of medical understanding - 'systemic self-awareness' - by which one is expected to be facilitated in whole or 'holotropic' wellnes, i.e. the conscious orientation of the three levels of human consciousness be they unconscious, subconscious, conscious or some other such phenomenalogical triune). To wit, consciousness, which is not necessarily bound in the customary locality of human pathology, communicates consciousness and there is therefore a spirit in any body, be it a body of knowledge or body of person. One final corollary of this digression being that we die, or meet Thanatos (or the Other Path of Knowing) not because our lives do not belong to us but because we belong to life and associating our identity with its identity through our evolving mythic propriety of all Creating lends each of us a greater faculty for the spiritual, meaning in this sense eternal and unbounded, health, not to mention conscious participation in planetary, lo, cosmic, culture and becoming - Universe the Verb, Success our omnipotent consort. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| To wit, medical becomes, in over medicalized culture, synonymous with mechanical which forces medical practioners to assume that the causes of the body's state of health or simply body-state or fundamentally, individual destiny and creative authority, are readily discernable to the knowledge system or subculture to which they, the medical practioner, subscribe or that pathology (love) is reducable at all to the so called laws of cause and effect. What gets missed is the whole range of motives of soul (or body identity) and its chief outlet, the body or, in culturally herstorical context, the archetypal Woman - the inter-relation of which, through culture, finds its chief expression in the transpersonal� pantheistic transcendence of gender (as opposed to pandemic 'sin' or being), the very ground of psi-intific knowledge and its soulful consensus in the cycles of body and nature, birth and life and death - pathology...magic. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| The scope of this often non-remedial treatment of "woman" (person) by medical practice expands even further when we consider that its dualistic reductionist oppositional dialecticism towards the conquering and eradication of any and all dis-ease is repeated isomorphically by the vulgar protestantism (again, material ontology) of an industrial or consumer product-driven culture which is vulgar not because it thrives on human need but because it reduces the mythology of human need to that which fits and can be regulated by laws of merely material exchange whose proper sphere is, by nature, only ever partially discernable in external information systems, for no market much more polity is ever unbounded by human prejudice invoked as it is by the very act and event of being - consciousness; knowledge of any kind changes the knower and is an artifact of the ever changing pattern and relation of cosmos to herself. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hence, in consumer culture, one's relative health affects (or seems to) productivity, attractiveness, identity and worth. In this light, it would appear the practice of medicine subverts its purpose - to facilitate the optimal amount of any health care recipient's freedom to define and refine their own destiny. Perhaps this cosmic contradiction is what led one doctor to say to me that being human was an act of self mutilation when it is painfully obvious that cosmos cannot mutilate cosmos - this sortof absurdity is a direct result of the logical positivism of science stumbling, in Dante's dark forest, upon the finger of God, the Soul, and being too terrified to reach up with its baby hand and touch it and feel its existential transcendence, of science having low self esteem. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| This is, of course, the pejorative image of medicine that has kept it divorced from art and by artfulness, a participation in a life and living system rather than a fact or belief system - the individual is therefore institutioon and as Institution a whole mythology, a whole biology of self or soul ultimately inviolate to any but the grandest cycles of cultural evolution the imagination can conceive. The individual mothers and is mothered, redeeming crass healing (crass culture) with transpersonal divinity vis a vis the whole river of time bound only by the intimate laws of the human heart. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| I shall finish with a quote from the human art, | |||||||||||||||||||||
| "For Whitman the conditions of nature implied the greatest possible measure of individualism and tolerance. In Whitman's concept of nature these forces are seen to balance and modify each other in a continuous process of growth. The eighteenth - century rationalism, with its concept of a universe whose final limits of form were already fixed by the laws of its being, had now served its time. To Whitman, to Emerson, to Thoreau, as to other contemporary leaders of liberal thought, the individual human intuition was the energetic force in the evolutionary condition. Mankind was called upon to "tramp a perpetual journey." One's freedom to follow his vision was limited only by the freedom of others on the same road, which extended backward to "the huge first Nothing," and forward beyond vistas no man could foresee, endlessly, forever." | |||||||||||||||||||||
| * | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Quoting from Introduction to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass And Selected Prose, Ed. Sculley Bradley Holt, Rinehart, And Winston, Inc. 1949 |
|||||||||||||||||||||
| ~ | |||||||||||||||||||||
| * | |||||||||||||||||||||
| finis. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| December 1, 2002 at Cheryl's | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Merry Christmas | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Back to home page... | |||||||||||||||||||||