I may be a member but there are some things up with which I will not put pt.8

N.T. Wright The New Testament and the People of God

We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself.

It's starting to come to you.

You aren't who you made yourself out to be.

An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer.

Apocalyptic changes everything. Its intense attentiveness to the minute particulars, to the infinity forever passing before our eyes, can leave us feeling ashamed of our ongoing impenetrability to the immediate. It creates an unrest within our minds, and it can only be overcome by imagining differently, by giving in to its aesthetic authority, by letting it invigorate the lazy conscience.

Apocalyptic shows us what we're not seeing. It can't be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of "the way things are" whose operation justifies itself by crowning itself as "the way things ought to be" and whose greatest virtue is in being "realistic". Thinking through what we mean when we say "realistic" is where apocalyptic begins. If these powers are the boot that, to borrow Orwell's phrase, presses down upon the human face forever, apocalyptic is the speech of that human face. Apocalyptic denies, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, the "forever" part.

For both the very human wielder of the boot and the very human face beneath if, apocalyptic has a way of curing deafness and educating the mind. In our confusion, we're accustomed to according the titles of good news and "a positive message" to the most soul-sucking, sentimental fare imaginable. Any song or story that deals with conflict by way of a strained euphemistic spin, a cliche, or a triumphal cupcake ending strikes us as the best in family entertainment. This is the opposite of apocalyptic. Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope (lest too light winning make the prize light). The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. Is it any surprise that we often won't know it when we see it?



What say you?

 

you think too much mike.

 

Is this religious stuff?

 

No.


Nowhere close.

 

Wow,

Your replying to your own thread under an alias. Are you like a serial killer or something? Your typing in red too

 

"...when he finds he will be troubled, when he becomes troubled he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All".


It is a destruction in that it's a destruction of illusions.

the blessing is that it gets you to doubt your mind and start using your eyes.

 

Question


What James Joyce have you read?


Secondly

What inspired this?

 

All the text and diff colors, a giant F on this paper.

 

I hate to say I haven't read much.

Portrait, of course, and a few shorter stories.

Life.