[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]A[/dropcap] crackpot reductionist demanded, in a flight of winged arrogance, “If you show me your God, I’ll show you my leprechaun.”
An Irish aphorism provides an apt reply: “Mrs. O’Brien, do you believe in fairies? No. I don’t. But they’re there.”
So, in your crackpot reductionism, you are saying because you cannot locate the literal form of Aphrodite that love does not exist. Apropos: Show me where love – or even the idea of a love song – exists in time and space.
Like Mrs. O’Brien, we know the gods by the living agency of their songs and their unique psychical signatures. Demanding the concretised appearance of a god as proof of their existence constitutes a type of lunatic realism that dwells in a bughouse cosmology of straw man fallacies.
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” —Carl Jung.
Question to US Americans whose anti-intellectual Calvinist ancestors and capitalist overlords and their Advertising Epoch propagandists are responsible for brainwashing you into believing that smart is stupid and wilful and belligerent ignorance is knowledge:
Have you considered that on each occasion you are forced to google a “5 dollar word” (notice: the capitalists’ and their dupes’ reflexive proclivity to commodify all things) — the act improves the value of your 10 cent head?
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
