The fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, will stand far away for the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning; saying, “Woe, woe, the great city, she who was dressed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in an hour such great riches are made desolate.” Every shipmaster, and everyone who sails anywhere, and mariners, and as many as gain their living by sea, stood far away, and cried out as they looked at the smoke of her burning, saying, “What is like the great city?” They cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying, “Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her great wealth!” For in one hour is she made desolate.The Revelation to John 18:14–19
The above text from what is commonly called the Book of Revelations is describing the fall of Babylon. To the readers of its day, however, it was predicting not the fall of Babylon, but the fall of Rome, most probably the fall of the Emperor Nero. For persecuted Jews and Christians to speak directly of the fall of Rome during the height of Roman power would have been so politically provocative as to be suicidal. Speaking of the fall of Rome could only be done by speaking of the fall of another detested enemy of the Jews from a past era. Conjuring up the horrible memories of the Babylonian captivity that a previous generation had suffered was a veiled way of reminding readers of a similar tragedy in the lives of the intended readers.
The generation of readers who suffered persecution during the time of Nero eventually slipped into history. The text written for them, the Apocalypse (or Revelation) to John, survived. In a sense it outlived its urgency. Its survival raises an interesting question to later generations who inherit it as a piece of presumably inspired canonical scripture.
As many interpreters of texts from the past have pointed out, there is no single meaning to a text. The meaning the text had for its author(s) is one meaning—it may well be a meaning that no later generation can fully recover. It's original meaning can be compared to a mathematical asymptote; it is a limit that can be approached but never quite reached. But the meaning of a text is by no means limited to the meaning it had for its original author or authors. Layers of meaning are constantly being added as circumstances change. This is why there can never be a definitive or final understanding of a living text. Texts are dynamic and forever shifting from one generation to another, and from one interpreter to another within a generation, and from one decade to another in the life of a single interpreter. With all those cautions in mind, let me play at finding meaning in the above passage from The Apocalypse to John.
First, it would be a mistake, I think, to read the text from the point of view of the authors. After all, they were not writing the text for themselves, but for their intended audience. In the case of the text under discussion, it was no doubt meant to give some kind of comfort to those who were being subjugated by an overwhelming power. It was meant to be read by those who were being left out of the wealth and comfort and luxury—the dainty and sumptuous being enjoyed by the wealthy and powerful.
To put the issues into the terms of today's society, the text was being written not to comfort the elected politicians and the prosperous executives of international corporations and those who lived on inherited wealth bade by their ancestors, but to comfort those people whose land has been taken from them and those who have been enslaved and those who must beg, or work at substandard wages, to eke out a living for themselves and their families. It is a text of comfort to, among others, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos and immigrants whose countries have been devastated by wars the Americans in positions of political and economic power have visited upon them
If John's Apocalypse has the purpose today of bringing comfort to the counterparts of the disenfranchised Jews and Christians experiencing neglect or subjugation during the time of the Roman empire, what is its meaning for the counterparts of the Romans? What is its purpose for the likes of wealthy and powerful men such as George W. Bush, John McCain, John Kerry, Rush Limbaugh, Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey and T. Boone Pickens? It could mean something like this:
The day is fast arriving when the “fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all.” And not only will you be mourning the loss of all that used to comfort you, but so will those merchants who became prosperous by catering to you in your hours of self-indulgence. Prepare for torment, weeping and mourning.
The text is not an invitation to be smug and self-satisfied with one's prosperity. It is not a text of congratulations to the wealthy and powerful for having God on their side.
Reading the text through a mind conditioned by Buddhist teachings, I am inclined to see the text as a reminder that all conditioned things are impermanent, and those who have become addicted to impermanent things are in for suffering, probably much sooner than they think.
The sunset was beautiful tonight. It did not last. The waxing moon is shining through my window. Whose is it?
Posted By Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/08/2008 07:36:00 PM
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ācakṣva śṛṇu vā tāta nānāśāstrāṇy anekaśaḥ
tathāpi na tava svāsthyaṃ sarvavismaraṇād ṛte
Recite numerous scriptures many times, my child, or listen to them.
Still, you will not be yourself until you forget everything.
This provocative verse (Aṣṭāvakrasaṃhitā XVI.1 ) suggests that all the religious practices one undertakes—listening to sacred texts, reciting them, praying, doing rituals, dutifully keeping commandments and following precepts—are in the final analysis obstacles to the project of being oneself (svāsthyam, literally, being situated in oneself). In other words, all those activities with which you identify, and all the doctrines with which you identify, are in fact concealing your identity from yourself and from everyone else. Those sacred texts and doctrines you study are the most probably the convictions of others. Most of them you never would have thought of on your own. They are not yours. Why take on someone else's self. Let's put it in stark terms. To the extent that you think of yourself as a Catholic, a Protestant, a Quaker, a Jew, a Muslim, rather than thinking of yourself just as you, you are failing to be who you really are.
It is not only a religious identity that conceals who one really is. Any attempt to see oneself as anything with limitations and boundaries is to settle for something incomplete and defective. Seeing yourself as a European American, or an African American, or an Asian American or a native American is to fail to be wholly American. To see yourself as an American is to fail to be wholly a human being. To see oneself as a human being is to settle for being less than just a being. Particularization is deficiency. Why celebrate being incomplete and unwhole?
Being fully who you are is to be aware of your being inextricably connected to everything that is. That kind of awareness is impossible so long as one is focusing only one part of your being, namely, the part with which you identify, the part you ordinarily think of as your self. The self is a persona, a mask, a disguise. It is what you wear when, for whatever reason, you will not or cannot appear as yourself.
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah voices a similar idea:
Don't remember the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall you not know it? (Isa 43.18–19)
Isaiah portrays God as saying that new things are constantly being created. The universe is in a state of constant renovation and re-creation. To the extent that you become rooted in the past, expecting the patterns of the past to be repeated, you miss getting all the updates and upgrades of the universe that are being presented at each moment. Expect yesterday's agreements and understandings to be in effect today and you may miss out on today's realities.
Remembering former things and considering things of old is behind some of the ugliest and most destructive behavior that human beings indulge in. When I was an undergraduate in Ottawa, I attended a public event in which a representative of the government of Israel debated with a representative of one of the Arab states. It took very little time for the debate to become heated and acrimonious. Each side had a long litany of injustices that they accused the other side of having committed. Before long it was apparent that both sides of this debate were so imprisoned by their memories of former things that they could considering nothing but things of old. Whatever new things might have sprung forth were entirely hidden from the view of these people who had become entrenched in their enmity. That was forty years ago. Turning on the news today and seeing the horrible slaughter of people in the conflict between Israel and the people in Gaza makes it clear that little has changed during the past forty years, and little is likely to change in the future, unless Israelis and Palestinians both wake up to who they truly are by forgetting that they are Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians.
It is fascinating to watch (and to participate in) the epidemic of hope that has gripped the United States of America as a result of the election of an African American to the presidency. For this to happen, a great deal of forgetting had to take place. Barack Obama is a deeply inspiring figure on the world stage, precisely because he reminds us all how important it is not to be stuck in remembrances of things past—past injustices, past failures, past successes, past victories for some and the inevitable defeats those victories meant for others. All those recollections that make up our particular social identities and mask our true identity as simple beings (or creatures, if you prefer that language) are to be forgotten as we focus on how we are all dependent on each other, as we remember that we forget our bonds with each other at our peril.
How the presidency of Barack Obama will unfold remains to be seen. I have no idea. But for now I am grateful that the invitation has been extended to all of us to wake up and forget.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 1/19/2009 08:53:00 PM
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When I was younger, I think I had the belief that remembering something was a matter of going into some kind of archive and retrieving information about something from the past. So if I wanted to know what my grandfather said right after the car we were in was hit in an intersection on Silver Avenue as we were on our way to see a baseball game, all I had to do was check the archives and pull that record out and examine it. I'm not sure I actually believed that, but I seem to remember believing something of that kind.
About twenty years ago or so, I witnessed an animated discussion among members of my extended family. They were trying to recall something like who lived in which room of the house they had lived in together in 1935. Each party in the discussion examined the archives, and each pulled out a different record. There was no way of settling the dispute, since no one had access to anything except someone human being's memory. The more the original disputants drew others into the discussion, the more inconsistent memories there were. All avenues to finding a solution were closed. Tempers flared. Voices spoke ever more loudly. Unpleasant expressions began to appear on faces. Whether my memory of the dispute is accurate, my account of it illustrates how conversations tend to go when different people remember things differently and there is no reliable authority to consult to settle whose memory is accurate and whose is at fault.
The dispute accounted above, and dozens of others like it, have inclined me to think of memory not as a passive mental activity of simply receiving images of the past somehow, but rather as an active act of telling stories that make sense of our present experiences. This is not to say that remembering something is deliberating concocting a pure fiction (if there is such a thing as as story that is purely fictitious). It is not like telling a deliberate lie. Rather, it is more like adding a few embellishments and removing a few apparently irrelevant details from a dim and nebulous and mostly incoherent hodgepodge of impressions. It is perhaps a little like solving a jigsaw puzzle. It is more like putting forward a possible solution to a mystery. Telling a story to oneself about the past is not done to deceive anyone, but to make private sense of things that have taken place more recently than the event being recollected. Perhaps instead of saying that I remember something it would be better to say I am making up a story about something in the past that is compatible with the beliefs I hold today.
For the past several months I have been reading the journal of George Fox, the man who is given credit for having founded the movement called the Children of Light, later called the Society of Friends and derisively called the Quakers. Fox's journal was not written as events unfolded. He did not write down his memories of each day at the end of the day. Rather, he dictated his memories of events in his life years after those events had taken place. It is fairly clear to a reader of the journal that Fox, in dictating his journal, was trying to make sense of how the Quaker movement had evolved. He was also trying, perhaps unconsciously, to give legitimacy to a religious movement that had been at the center of a great deal of controversy. Given the large number of quotations of and allusions to biblical passages, it is also obvious that Fox was showing that his story of the Quakers was a continuation of the story of Jesus Christ as told in the gospels and the letters of Paul and other apostles. The stories (for there are more than one version) told in the Bible of the life and teaching and death of Jesus are themselves recorded memories of events that had taken place decades before the memories were written down, and it is pretty clear that they are attempts to show that the story of Israel was still unfolding in a particular way that involved the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. They are making sense of what might otherwise seem a meaningless and pointlessly brutal death.
George Fox and the authors of the Gospels may have been innocent of the extent to which they were making up stories to make sense of present realities. They may have been naive. They may also have been, to at least some extent, calculating and crafty. Whatever the case may be, taking the stories they told at face value, without taking into account the story-telling nature of what we call memory, would be to participate in a naivety that verges on being inexcusably careless. There is only one way to read memories: carefully, critically and skeptically.
My skepticism about memory (my own and everyone else's) may account for why I prefer to avoid religious doctrines that are based mostly on historical narratives. They feel too much as if someone is trying to sell a particular story and to preclude other accounts. Making one's own story legitimate almost always entails making someone else's story illegitimate. And that usually leads to tempers flaring, voices speaking ever more loudly, and unpleasant expressions beginning to appear on faces. Such things make life unpleasant. Or so it seems to me.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 2/09/2009 10:28 PM
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