OF A GOLDEN AGE

since my previous post I’ve had a couple of interesting experiences relating to god. the first happened saturday evening. a friend of mine told me about part of an interview he’d recently watched, which turned out to be Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth series. Campbell describes a logical connection: if god is love, then doesn’t it hold that love is god? love is blissed-out and terrifying at the same time, a suffering caused and relieved by the same individual. in Richard Linklater’s incredible movie Before Sunrise, Celine (Julie Delpy) tells Jesse (Ethan Hawke, swoon) that she believes god exists in the connection between two people who love each other. I have to say, I find this idea tremendously alluring.

what caught in both my friend’s and my throat about this, though, is that Tom McBride has been inundating us with Wittgenstein’s idea that the word “is” can have two meanings. I think, though, that that is an early Wittgensteinian idea — the later Wittgenstein, himself a compelling figure about whom I’ll write sometime, was much more free-wheeling and intuitive about the shifting nature of language.

the other god-event relates directly to Wittgenstein. whilst browsing at an enormous used bookstore in Madison yesterday afternoon, I combed the philosophy section for a book I’ll need for Tom’s class in case I might find it for a lower price. the several Wittgenstein books in stock included one about contemporary thinkers in Christianity. WHAT?! does that mean Wittgenstein’s amorphous style is a mechanism for the exact illogical religious thought I mentioned before! this is a horrifying thought.

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