Spring in full swing. At the coffeehouse that I visited on the morning of the first big blizzard. A rare treat, but I needed to try to repair the computer using some network other than the one at the libraries, and the mind was feeling a bit indistinct. Coffee, after all, is a drug. A wonderful, wonderful drug. Ironically, within a stone's throw of the local LDS temple, which for some reason is shrouded in scaffolding for a restoration, despite only being about 25 years old. At night, the grid of construction lights across the front of the facade suggests another structure altogether, a lit grid of passageways and supporting beams that brings to mind the set for the Kafka that I saw in Budapest at the Vigszinhas. The angel at the top corner is missing, though, or perhaps just masked. Originally, when the first temples were being built, the statue was commissioned as a Gabriel, but when the builders visited the artist's atelier, they decided to name it after the angel proper to their own texts, hence "Moroni.'
The Kafka was an eerie show -- one of the most amazing pieces I've seen, and at a house that seems to specialize in broad comedies (with a Western inflection) broadly staged. The scaffolding structure was essentially cylindrical, built above the revolve, and the actors would traverse the scaffolding in various characteristic manners while the set was turning. As I think of this now, and it hadn't occurred to me before, I think I visited the Vigszinhas for a Godot when I visited the city as an undergraduate. Unicum at the intermission, staring afterwards at the paper mache tree far beneath me on the stage, and the mysterious fellows who stood for something distant and mystical for the young traveller from Virginia.
For after that it truly was manifested unto the first elder that he had received remission of his sins, he was entangled again in the vanities of the world, but after truly repenting, God visited him by an holy angel, whose countenance was as lightning, and whose garments were pure and white above all whiteness, and gave unto him commandments which inspired him from on high, and gave unto him power, by the means of which was before prepared that he should translate a book; which book contains a record of a fallen people, and also the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and also to the Jews, proving unto them that the holy scriptures be true, and also that God doth inspire men and call them to his holy work in these last days, as well as in days of old, that he may be the same God forever—amen.
With the floreat of springtime, the mind grows a bit indistinct. Trudging through the winter blizzards in the night, the mind necessarily becomes focused on the reality of things, and the body's relation to the world is clear and distinct. It is the mechanism by which the mind survives the night. But awakening in the springtime air, there seems a superfluity to the fleshy body. It's almost a burden, like a garden that constantly needs weeding. A heaviness, perhaps because of the hours in the gym over the winter, lifting weights to increase the physical strength. And this sensation inclines the mind to the opposite, to the crystal clarity, the latticework of construction lights forming a geometrical pattern, the distant angel. The object -- not of understanding, but the object that the mind encounters, seeeking its own transformation.
The name Moroni, according to the historians of the LDS church, apparently traces to the language of the proto-American people described in their scriptures. The point being that the old traditions of the land on which we stand, the things buried and not yet discovered, have to do with God, and specifically, God as known through Christianity. More verifiably, there is a very similar Aramaic term, "Maron," one which might be a textual crux, or a diminutive form of "lord."
That there is something underneath, a structure as yet unrevealed, of logical and symmetrical order, a sparse scaffolding.
Schelling, as he developed his doctrine in increasing contradistinction from Fichte, came to believe in the transforming power of nature upon the mind. As opposed to dividing the world into the (ultimately, Cartesian extensional) duality of I and not-I, with the "I" having its being and increase by encountering all of the things that are not the mind, Schelling, like Aristotle, reasoned that the mind itself was a part of nature, and was subject to the transforming power of nature. Fichte, perhaps is a doctrine for adversity -- the self coming to its clear existence as it confronts the (ultimately hostile) world. And then, though, the springtime, and the sense that we are interpenetrated and brought to our floreat by these waves of life in the springtime, our eyes not our own eyes but instead, as in the Grateful Dead song, the eyes of the world.
And at such times, we focus the mind upon what we saw so clearly in adversity, and attempt to restore the clarity and distinctness (force and specification) of our relationship to the world. This is a second creation, the humanity regrowing, like (Elijah's?) field of bare bones, or the forms arising from the mud in Ovid's story of Pyrra and Deucalion. What we are doing is perhaps the active form, the verb of humanity; the humanization of nature. The streams of life aren't coursing over us like muddy flats, but are drawn to deepening channels of the mind's creation. We look to distant structures, memories, scaffoldings in motion, and the memory of a distant angel that led us to a text, one that we were able to begin the work of translation.
Surrounded by people captive to the present mimetic, the human comedy, broadly told, we silently and inwardly carry the faith, which is not an assent to an abstract proposition, but the continuous silent work of distinctly human existence -- against the life, and yet of the life.
Hm, the computer repair didn't work. Perhaps the fault isn't in the library's network -- will have to try it again over VPN from an outside network, or perhaps simply buy a USB and rebuild everything from scratch. The work continues.