(no subject)

A trouble I have with agnosticism: If you just mean you can never be certain that you are certain, and need people to take special note of this, why not just write that on all your shirts under a big asterisk and then--since everyone's now aware of your qualm--live your life making the necessary or most appropriate assumptions, including ones pertaining to whether or not God is a lie? This kind of agnosticism applies to every question at once, after all. You don't just not know about God, you don't know about ice cream or Uruguay, about knowing, about not knowing. If, on the other hand, your agnosticism finds God to be a special kind of metaphysical question: why? Why the special treatment? Because of what people have said? Because they say it's a category to itself, as prior to other questions as those of knowledge's nature and possibility? Once you're age, say, six, you should probably have figured out that what you're told needs to be screened, i.e. subjected to criteria of logical consistency and empirical appropriateness. Not that you'll know those words for a while, or yet realize they should be applied to what you've already soaked up as well as what's incoming. I can understand universal doubt (though not going on and on about it), but specific protests of doubt are always loaded. You're enclosing something. The six-year-old missed a spot.

(no subject)

A trouble I have with gnosticism: What the hell is this demiurge business? If the Real Thing emanated, tapered until it stretched or faded into lesser reality, isn't distance itself already our villain? I don't understand the need to make things personal. Aids the imagination, sure, annoys the monotheists, but it's dangerously religious. Once you picture a face, there's nothing stopping you from having conversations or making transactions or whatever. Distracting, impure. And this Sophia business. I get the moral and I like it better than its Biblical cousin-myth with Eve and the Tree and all that--at least here it's only incomplete or unReal knowledge that kills--but making Wisdom female is unkind to women, casting them in the role of sought rather than seeker, guide rather than pilgrim. Which I guess they are if only men are getting things wrong, but that's no good the other way. Sophia offends my egalitarianism. And we're in iffy territory anthropomorphizing Wisdom at all; even if the Knowledge sought is something somehow interpersonal, related to community or sex, that's slightly different from its being a specific being. Again, religion alert.

(Sophia might be closer to okay if there were also a Sophium for those lusting elsewise. Do female artists find male muses? Dickinson kind of did, but that may have been a more concrete relation. There was a real "don't you touch my man damn it" feel there. Austen and Eliot are ironic about their male figures, if often fond of them. And these often seem to be just half-there; or prove less fascinating once fully known, as in the Brontes' works. Irritable, expressive suits of clothing. Nothing to draw one inward and upward. So many of the others on whose greatness there's consensus seem woman-directed.)