Dies Irae

...nobody is anything...

Here is a little something of me. A little of my transom, a little snap-through of the clouds drifting through my sky. (The all-sky?) Thinking about homeopathy on the way back home I was pulled away from the near-death of College street. Thinking how homeopathy and “Western” medicine have orthogonal frameworks. Perhaps not orthogonal, but apposite, if that is the right word to use. At any rate, little intersection—but that doesn’t mean they don’t step on each others’ toes all the time. Though about it through the lens of existential questions. Homeopathy provides a human understanding of our ailments, mainstream medicine seeks a measured distance away from our predicament. Which is better depends on the condition at hand. Deep existential anxieties: inevitable death, rot, breakouts, invisible forces descending on us. Which is better? Healing with an understanding, holistic but ineffectual-when-it-comes-to-the-inhuman-universe paradigm, or with a at-times-effective-but-itself-startlingly-inhuman paradigm? I don’t know. I wanted to sing western medicine’s praises because it works, but it doesn’t work for the things we are most deeply anxious about. How could it. Of course, neither does homeopathy, but this line of thought takes some wind from the sails of the “it works, bitches” argument for biomedicine.

Occurred to me I don’t know the full, and surely complicated story of homeopathy. Batshit insanity, fantasy, wishful thinking, magical thinking, placebo effects, post hoc ergo propter hoc surely abounds at the fringes of an unregulated industry, but is that fringe or core? What is the core idea behind homeopathy? Is it that we need to be more integrative? But that’s silly. Biomedicine gets integrative when piecemeal solutions don’t work. It gradually changes. It is not a Newtonian monolith—that would be a straw man. In fact, physiology is deeply infused with modern dynamicist thinking, with its own philosophically troubling circular causation, its own part-whole conundrums. Modern “materialism” misunderstands modern physiology. But such is life.

Occurred to me boundary is blurry. So then we need to look at clusters of ideas. Surely there are scientifically informed holistic practitioners. So what’s the problem? Eastern ideas? Traditional medicine? What does that even mean? Traditional medicine too is developing. All a kind of soup my thinking gets me into. But this is not-that-informed thinking.

And nobody is anything. Harsh words. Soup words. Words of universal compassion. As we arise, we pass away. Each moment. Each thought. Each sensation. Each sense-impression. Each association. But also: each insight, each personality, each transformation, each warm, vanishing wave of the heart, each life, each culture, each war, each trauma, each meal, each longing, each delight, each ache and itch as it travels up and down and in an out and spiraling, each flash of anger as it mobilizes, checks resources, grabs the attention, pulls it into its own lens; each memory just that: a trace carried here, a fly caught in associative winds. Present, somehow bodily, but experienced as absent.

And what is God? She too arises and passes away. In people, in episodes, over the course of a day, in the duration of a glance, in the rustling of a skirt, in a shout on the street, in the printing of a theodicy, in families, in nations. God’s rising and falling arc during an economic crisis: positive anima (or animus), negative anima; present anima, absent anima. All in absentia. God in a leaf; gods in the intonations of the Lord’s Prayer. God as synecdoche: “give us this day our daily bread”. God arising up the elevator, falling out of the office tower. Golden calves on Ben Vrackie’s fields, now fallow with trodding human hooves. Gods arise in vapour columns and perish in the eyes of hurricanes. Gods encircle the world and flat down in watersheds, down the Ganges, bathing the pilgrims. God absent in the stampede, in the artillery barrage, in the bombing of Calcutta. Mysteriously present again, old Loki, in Mother Teresa’s mischievous grin, in hoofbeats down the street. God as the all-white cowboy encountered at crossroads. Every one the same. But the surfaces are different. As different as oranges and clementines.

Reminds me: leave a little milk and bread out for Orpheus. A little earthsmoke and rue. Dance a circle in a forest grove. Cantabrian circle (Spanish cavalry maneuver). Watch the constellation of the Rider, Staff, Way. God arising in the beginning of each of Rilke’s elegies and dying away to a man, to a warm fuzzy feeling at the end. God too dies into reality. Dies irae. Somehow we com off disappointed. Behind the door is just another room. But now we have more space.

Space! Dies illa!

God arises and dies away over the course of a page. Arpeggiated.

Ah, God is Mozart. It’s so obvious. God is a steppe wolf. I am God (says Kerouac). Ginsberg’s not so pompous. Lived longer, too. Greater man, I wager. God is big. The great King. (We don’t put much stock into such political organization.)

I am God.

I am a fuck-up. A jerk-off. A wastrel. A culture maggot, grown up to nothing. Listened in too many philosophy lectures. Silly, jobless, mystical, inspired.

He who despises himself still honours himself as one who despises. (Lacrymosa.)

I don’t despise myself. (Communio.)... The Leakeys would be proud. Every moment of inspration feels like it's going back to a source.

The point: there’s something to homeopathy. But that something might just be compassion. And some biomedical doctors have that too, I hope I will have it. (If I dare hope.)

And God waxes and wanes within a single parenthetical sentence.

Consider: "We develop concentration for the sake of mindfulness, mindfulness for the sake of insight, insight for the sake of wisdom, and wisdom for the sake of freedom."