Author Archives: wcturgeon

Reconsidering religion/recognizing ignorance

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St. Mary's Church, Shelter Island

St. Mary’s Church, Shelter Island

So after a couple of years hiatus from attending church, I have tentatively started back up with going to a Sunday service at the small but lovely Episcopal church, St. Mary’s, on Shelter Island.  I enter the church building with full awareness that I am a skeptic among what I take to be genuine believers.  There is an element of awkwardness in listening to the gospels and readings from the bible and putting all of them in brackets, all of them as evoking a suspension of belief or a rush to a metaphorical level.  Apollo and Dionysus seem as real to me, many days, as are Jesus and Paul.  I accept that the latter two were real human beings but their status as a god/saint-prophet parallel my Greek ‘friends’ of Apollo and Dionysus. Oh, and Athena, Artemis…  In some ways I find the greek gods lingering around the island, right behind that tree or as a whisper on the wind.  But that aside, I am acknowledgedly a creation of the Christian world view.  And there is a value is stepping away from one’s immersion in life to contemplate larger ideas than committees and what is due when in the office.

It is now the Lenten season and while I cannot escape my view of the entire story as another mystery myth, paralleling the story of Dionysus in some disturbing ways, I acknowledge that stories may be the only thing we have.  –And in fact are essential for us when faced with the vast universe full of nothing of question marks.  Religion may, as suggested by primatologist Franz De Waal, offer us a narrative that helps us make sense of the booming buzzing world.  Not true in a literal sense but in a way which enriches our view of ourselves and the brief nanosecond we spend in this place.  And after all, stories are always truth in the end.  And they whisper like the wind in our ears: you do not know.  This message is what I value the most.  After all, hubris is how the world will end.

the land of echoes

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IMG_2686Last weekend my brother, husband and I took a walk down Shell Beach, a long spit of land that juts out into the Bay on the south side of Shelter Island.  It was the first day in memory where the temperature reached the 40s–a relative heat wave.  The sun was warm even if the wind was brisk as it blowed off the frigid bay.  The dog zoomed around, happy to be sniffing at the millions of shells littering the beach.  As it turns out “Shell Beach” is aptly named.   As we rounded the point and began the trek back to the car we came across a place of magic incantation.  Well, that is what I immediately thought as I gazed at the grove of stunted and seemingly dead trees emerging from the beach sand.  Each tree boasted conch shells in various forms of brokenness which were placed on the barren branches.

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Where did they come from?  Who was the first person who placed a shell on a branch and how did that beckon others to do the same?  Here nature and culture collided in silent witness to the fetishizing of the natural world.  Now natural elements (conch shells) were transformed into sign/symbol/icon of meaning (culture.)  Was this a cultish religion?  a druidic memory?  a game of children?  (No, the shells were too high on the tree branches for children to have begun this event.)  An offering to the sea gods?

There remained something both startlingly human and almost sinister in this vision of trees with shells.  The violence with which each shell was impaled on a branch was not lost to us viewers.  We shivered… and moved back towards the warmth and safety of our car, our culture.  But I think often of those branches and I am tempted to return to sit silently as a witness.

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Contemplations from the Oort Cloud

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So it has been a while since I created a post here.  My bad.  But with teaching, working on conferences, committee work, and life in general, I find little time for blogging.  I have, however, discovered Cowbird and love the image/narrative cadence it offers.  I have posted a couple of modest contributions in recent days.

oortcloud2Today, however, I am reveling in the idea of the Oort Cloud.  This cloud of frozen rock is the source of comets that race by our planet in regular intervals. Nothing living/but multiplicity with motion, ‘goals’ or impetus to move beyond into our regions and towards the sun–the death of all that enters it. Or perhaps it is a cloud composed entirely of Oorts–little creatures with big red eyes and bat-like wings that flit around the solar system, looking for minds that have wandered into territories unknown.  Attracted by the chemical scent of curiosity and the glow of visions unseen, an Oort hovers over the unsuspecting being, watching, waiting… much as we used to imagine angels did.

What is outside over there (as Maurice Sendak captured so beautifully in his mysterious picture book) that invites us to look up at the moon, to seek out the stars?  And why does the Oort cloud image resemble Parmenides’ idea of Being?

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