Getting well: back to the Body

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The great Hamann said that original sin had/has to do not w/sex but w/reason. You know, the sick kind. He describes it, he felt it.

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On the other hand, some great scholars let their own reason devour them alive and not because they didn't feel it. When Thucydides described the decay of his "country" into calculated self-interest and hardness of heart, he found the world that he looked at looking back at him and that look infected him. So that his own spirit seems almost unwillingly cold and hard, as though the subject matter gave him no choice, as though it gave him no place else to go. This is what I fear too -- that in describing a hardened world, my own writing will become hard and cynical. Whenever you look at the world you see it looking back at you and its looking wants to change you into itself, unless you can look *from* some vantage point that makes you secure -- such as "the rock that is higher than I" in the psalm. Thucydides didn't have a second "country" to flee into. There was no safe place for his reason to hide. Likewise Tacitus was wedged into the evil he so wittily retails. Many others too.

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What the hell am I talking about here? This isn't what I set out to say.

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I wanted to talk about health. All I know is that words about health have to embody in themselves what health is seeking to be, where it wants to go. The words look at sickness across a plain whose emptiness pulls like electromagnetism or like gravity -- with a curing force if the words pull in the right direction, but the words die if they themselves get pulled. Every sentence becomes a battleground littered with bodies. I think I still don't know fully what I'm talking about. I am not pretending to be well myself. I know that I am profoundly sick, so sick that the word "know" is also sick.

God can only heal the person I am, never the person I pretend to be, even if the pretend person is "better". You first have to be real before you can be helped, because the unreal person you are pretending to be may be helped and healed but only in that unreal world where it exists in the first place. So watch out re turning faith into nothing but a story, be careful, watch your language, get well, get real.

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