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Christians tend to fight the idea that the human mind can be reduced to a slab of meat but should they do so? Should they fight so hard for the autonomy and self-directedness of the mind? Isn't that really a rather Pelagian stand?
What about the alternate idea that the mind is a physical process to which something mysterious and exterior has been applied? Shall we say that its existence has been touched with the breath of God? That creativity is as applied from the outside? Would Luther balk at that idea?
Those who study the brain find nothing in its structure that isn't physical, though in so doing they do leave a certain something unexlained.
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So mind would be a very special inlet of body, one that has been pinched with a divine touch whose credit it (the mind) has arrogated to itself. Sheer Body is pushed out of the room, Soul (or a version of it) promotes itself as the author of its own riches -- of its own being, really. The myth begins that extension is dead. This despite the fact that when a body dies the mind can no longer be found. In this scenario, from the Christian point of view, it is the mind and not the body that is in a state of sin.
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What about the Body in her exclusion? There she waits in the midst of the other "dead" things: the fields with fresh asphalt running through them, the animals grazing and waiting for what they don't know and what they know they don't know.
If extension is dead, nothing stops that death from seizing the mind in its hidden condition of extension. On the other hand, if something truly living has swept the mind like a chord, then nothing stops that life from touching the world of things as well. The poet looks at the world and not only feels it looking back but in fact already looking and long having looked, looking as from a long time ago.
Poetry is a place (not mere words) and that place is living insofar as it too has been swept, in some subtle way, by that ever so soft divine breath, that "applied from outside", that gives the mind its feeling of power. And Soul knows all this but when he reflects on it he grows very scared.
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The sense of being having broken into the words and now breaking their fragments into tiny haunted speakers, that feeling is what gave Heidegger's philosophy both its power and its maddening imprecision. Now California trembles slightly. The hawk moving over the yellow weeds will sweep the sky with deep feeling. Is my mind to be the force applying the feeling from outside? Oh please, look again.
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