(no subject)
Netflix has Duck Soup. I'd never seen any Marx Brothers stuff before, so I watched it. I'm sure there's lots I didn't get, and some things didn't age well, but I gotta say, nearly eighty years on, I about died when someone asked Harpo for a light and he pulled a blowtorch out of his pants.
Also, you can really see where Animaniacs got its inspiration. Yakko and Wakko are uncannily like Groucho and Harpo. Part of me kept thinking how cruel Harpo's jokes were, until it occurred to me that the way to beat him would have been to walk away. Which nobody did. Trying to get him back was useless. It didn't upset him, and he just turned around and got you back worse. Could be a life lesson there...
So a non-Christian outdid me in theology again. Not that he'd ever know. Neil Gaiman, he of the baroque horror and love of stories put that wonderful line into his Doctor Who episode about people being bigger on the inside. The brilliance being that the character who said it was the TARDIS. The famous living timeship. The thing for which everyone's first reaction is "It's bigger on the inside!" (preceding or following the ceremonial run-around-the-outside-to-make-sure-it's-really-that-size) It wasn't a coincidence; Gaiman believes it's true. TVTropes starts its page for Gaiman this quote:
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world - no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. (from The Sandman)
And I got to thinking today: we are so very good at trying to make ourselves smaller on the inside. To the point where we fool other people, or we assume other people are also small. We see what we want to see about them, and stuff them in boxes. We look at ourselves, what we are and what we do, and we stuff ourselves in boxes. The worlds Gaiman mentioned are quieted and put away, and we pretend they're not there. If we like them or accept them, even then we don't talk about them, for fear of being laughed at, or rejected, or feared.
When I was reading about synesthesia, one constant was that people who have it are usually aware that it's "all in their head", and don't tell anyone about it. Synesthesia is usually harmless, sometimes useful, and generally ignorable. So a lot of synesthetes, when they find out that it's a "thing", are surprised. They see the world differently, from each other as well as from non-synesthetes, and had no idea they weren't the only one.
It's not just synesthetes.
This past year has been one of upheaval for me. Most people when they reach 30 are settling down, be it in a career or in a marriage. If they aren't, it's still a point where the mad hormones of teenagers have faded away and the body has settled into "adult" mode. We're done growing. We know how our brains work pretty much, where our limits are and how to maintain sanity - hopefully. We know what our equilibrium is. Me, I went out and got diagnosed with AD/HD. On one hand, it confirmed a lot of suspicions and explained some mysteries. On the other hand, I started taking a drug that alters my mental limits and my perception of the world. My attention span shot up. I could keep my mind on one problem for a useful amount of time, long enough to break it down and tackle it in pieces. I didn't have to rely on sheer intellect, now I could summon up things like sustained effort and continuing processes. I found I could suddenly pick up all the nonverbal cues going on around me. I could switch gears without stripping them, as it were. I could get things done.
"Holy cow!" I said to myself, "I could be anything!"
If you think this meant I expanded the worlds inside me, you'd be wrong. Human ingenuity being what it is, those worlds got a bit bigger for awhile and then shrank. You get your identity shaken up and what do you do? Shore up, hunker down, try to make it through. Not conducive to growth. Not long-term, anyway. Which isn't all bad: big shake-ups require some hunkering-down if we're to survive. But once you've got the hang of the shake-up, you readjust and then you can grow again.
I was forgetting who I am. Still am. (Always will. It's a human thing.) The truth of the matter is, the human mind/soul cannot comprehend itself, not fully. There will always be more to discover, and plenty that I'll get wrong. But there is so much more of me than I realize. I can't be everything, but I can be anything. And we rarely get how big "anything" actually is. "Anything" is infinity.
So far is all psychology and philosophy. The theology is this: God is infinite. God is infinitely creative. God loves variety and diversity. If you have a working sensory apparatus, you know this. God absolutely made us bigger on the inside. We have eternity itself in our hearts, or so Ecclesiastes tells us. I've begun to believe that not only are we bigger on the inside to start with, God is constantly making us bigger. He deepens our souls, makes the palette of our emotions wider and richer, adds variations and subtleties every moment. I used to think the secret to staying sane in a mad and broken world was to keep it from affecting me. Now I think that the secret is understanding that we can take a whole lot more than we realize. The very depths of sorrow and loss make the heights of joy higher and the richness of blessings richer. The pain we go through, God willing, can make pleasure sharper. Sometimes it feels like it'll tear me apart. So far it hasn't. Maybe it could. After all, we're imperfect, and imperfect glass will shatter if heated too quickly. Do it right, though, and it will hold. I think God's capable of doing it right.
I've heard from theologians that the way to truly repent is to get a glimpse of God's holiness, and our darkness will look all the more wretched. Trouble is, people can get stuck on that part. When you're way down at the bottom of a hole, you can doubt that anybody can reach you. When we're at our most despicable, we fail to see that life could be any different. We make God small, thinking he's not strong enough. We make ourselves small, thinking we can't live any other way. We have no idea how far we can go. We have no idea what's possible, which is to say, anything. Some days it's like we're a step away from the light, just a heartbeat from renewal, but we've decided that it's miles and miles away and never take that step.
Gaiman isn't the only one: C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle both wrote about the wideness of possibility, of the bigness of the human soul. Lewis especially wrote how it's evil and darkness that are small, that lack imagination, that are full of conformity and dullness. When we cling to false notions about ourselves, when we ignore the facets and tendrils of our souls, we get stunted and small. When we give up what we think we ought to be, the little cages we build, we can stretch and grow. When we let our worldview stretch to meet the things in the world, the destruction and death as well as creation and life, the love mixed with pain and darkness, the bitter mixed with the sweet, the beauty that flourishes in the bare places, we get bigger. The people around us are no longer ciphers, they're people, with all the rights and responsibilities and priviledges thereof, all the heights and depths and possibilities. Our souls expand to meet them, and we ourselves are bigger.
It's then that love approaches natural, that mercy approaches inevitable, that truth becomes foundational, and righteousness desirable.
There are a billion billion different ways that a person can be Christlike, that a person can be holy, a true child of God. Any one of us can be a hundred of them from the time we're born to the time we die, and we are all different from each other. We are all more than we can imagine.
God alone sees us as we really are, the bigness of our souls and all that we can be. He alone knows the full breadth of our talents, the limits of our strengths, and the extent of our weaknesses. He knows what we can take. He knows what we can do. If he says I'm bigger than I think I am, who am I to disagree?
Also, you can really see where Animaniacs got its inspiration. Yakko and Wakko are uncannily like Groucho and Harpo. Part of me kept thinking how cruel Harpo's jokes were, until it occurred to me that the way to beat him would have been to walk away. Which nobody did. Trying to get him back was useless. It didn't upset him, and he just turned around and got you back worse. Could be a life lesson there...
So a non-Christian outdid me in theology again. Not that he'd ever know. Neil Gaiman, he of the baroque horror and love of stories put that wonderful line into his Doctor Who episode about people being bigger on the inside. The brilliance being that the character who said it was the TARDIS. The famous living timeship. The thing for which everyone's first reaction is "It's bigger on the inside!" (preceding or following the ceremonial run-around-the-outside-to-make-sure-it's-really-that-size) It wasn't a coincidence; Gaiman believes it's true. TVTropes starts its page for Gaiman this quote:
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world - no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. (from The Sandman)
And I got to thinking today: we are so very good at trying to make ourselves smaller on the inside. To the point where we fool other people, or we assume other people are also small. We see what we want to see about them, and stuff them in boxes. We look at ourselves, what we are and what we do, and we stuff ourselves in boxes. The worlds Gaiman mentioned are quieted and put away, and we pretend they're not there. If we like them or accept them, even then we don't talk about them, for fear of being laughed at, or rejected, or feared.
When I was reading about synesthesia, one constant was that people who have it are usually aware that it's "all in their head", and don't tell anyone about it. Synesthesia is usually harmless, sometimes useful, and generally ignorable. So a lot of synesthetes, when they find out that it's a "thing", are surprised. They see the world differently, from each other as well as from non-synesthetes, and had no idea they weren't the only one.
It's not just synesthetes.
This past year has been one of upheaval for me. Most people when they reach 30 are settling down, be it in a career or in a marriage. If they aren't, it's still a point where the mad hormones of teenagers have faded away and the body has settled into "adult" mode. We're done growing. We know how our brains work pretty much, where our limits are and how to maintain sanity - hopefully. We know what our equilibrium is. Me, I went out and got diagnosed with AD/HD. On one hand, it confirmed a lot of suspicions and explained some mysteries. On the other hand, I started taking a drug that alters my mental limits and my perception of the world. My attention span shot up. I could keep my mind on one problem for a useful amount of time, long enough to break it down and tackle it in pieces. I didn't have to rely on sheer intellect, now I could summon up things like sustained effort and continuing processes. I found I could suddenly pick up all the nonverbal cues going on around me. I could switch gears without stripping them, as it were. I could get things done.
"Holy cow!" I said to myself, "I could be anything!"
If you think this meant I expanded the worlds inside me, you'd be wrong. Human ingenuity being what it is, those worlds got a bit bigger for awhile and then shrank. You get your identity shaken up and what do you do? Shore up, hunker down, try to make it through. Not conducive to growth. Not long-term, anyway. Which isn't all bad: big shake-ups require some hunkering-down if we're to survive. But once you've got the hang of the shake-up, you readjust and then you can grow again.
I was forgetting who I am. Still am. (Always will. It's a human thing.) The truth of the matter is, the human mind/soul cannot comprehend itself, not fully. There will always be more to discover, and plenty that I'll get wrong. But there is so much more of me than I realize. I can't be everything, but I can be anything. And we rarely get how big "anything" actually is. "Anything" is infinity.
So far is all psychology and philosophy. The theology is this: God is infinite. God is infinitely creative. God loves variety and diversity. If you have a working sensory apparatus, you know this. God absolutely made us bigger on the inside. We have eternity itself in our hearts, or so Ecclesiastes tells us. I've begun to believe that not only are we bigger on the inside to start with, God is constantly making us bigger. He deepens our souls, makes the palette of our emotions wider and richer, adds variations and subtleties every moment. I used to think the secret to staying sane in a mad and broken world was to keep it from affecting me. Now I think that the secret is understanding that we can take a whole lot more than we realize. The very depths of sorrow and loss make the heights of joy higher and the richness of blessings richer. The pain we go through, God willing, can make pleasure sharper. Sometimes it feels like it'll tear me apart. So far it hasn't. Maybe it could. After all, we're imperfect, and imperfect glass will shatter if heated too quickly. Do it right, though, and it will hold. I think God's capable of doing it right.
I've heard from theologians that the way to truly repent is to get a glimpse of God's holiness, and our darkness will look all the more wretched. Trouble is, people can get stuck on that part. When you're way down at the bottom of a hole, you can doubt that anybody can reach you. When we're at our most despicable, we fail to see that life could be any different. We make God small, thinking he's not strong enough. We make ourselves small, thinking we can't live any other way. We have no idea how far we can go. We have no idea what's possible, which is to say, anything. Some days it's like we're a step away from the light, just a heartbeat from renewal, but we've decided that it's miles and miles away and never take that step.
Gaiman isn't the only one: C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle both wrote about the wideness of possibility, of the bigness of the human soul. Lewis especially wrote how it's evil and darkness that are small, that lack imagination, that are full of conformity and dullness. When we cling to false notions about ourselves, when we ignore the facets and tendrils of our souls, we get stunted and small. When we give up what we think we ought to be, the little cages we build, we can stretch and grow. When we let our worldview stretch to meet the things in the world, the destruction and death as well as creation and life, the love mixed with pain and darkness, the bitter mixed with the sweet, the beauty that flourishes in the bare places, we get bigger. The people around us are no longer ciphers, they're people, with all the rights and responsibilities and priviledges thereof, all the heights and depths and possibilities. Our souls expand to meet them, and we ourselves are bigger.
It's then that love approaches natural, that mercy approaches inevitable, that truth becomes foundational, and righteousness desirable.
There are a billion billion different ways that a person can be Christlike, that a person can be holy, a true child of God. Any one of us can be a hundred of them from the time we're born to the time we die, and we are all different from each other. We are all more than we can imagine.
God alone sees us as we really are, the bigness of our souls and all that we can be. He alone knows the full breadth of our talents, the limits of our strengths, and the extent of our weaknesses. He knows what we can take. He knows what we can do. If he says I'm bigger than I think I am, who am I to disagree?