44 years ago today, a musical earthquake occurred. See the Making of Ziggy here.
Play it again Sam
Play it again and again Sam. The first hour of this podcast focuses on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the political implications of the recent terrorist attack in Orlando. Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2
Walker Percy: the Human Condition in an Age of Science
Coming soon in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Stay tuned.
1. PHILOSOPHER OF PRECISION AND SOUL: INTRODUCING WALKER PERCY by Leslie Marsh
This article introduces the work of philosopher-novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy’s work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite comprising Cartesianism and derivatively misapplied science and social atomism.
2. LIFE ON THE ISLAND by Elizabeth Corey
Walker Percy was both a medical doctor and a serious Catholic—a scientist and a religious believer. He thought, however, that science had become hegemonic in the twentieth century and that it was incapable of answering the most fundamental needs of human beings. He thus leveled a critique of the scientific method and its shortcomings in failing to address the individual person over against the group. In response to these shortcomings Percy postulates a religious understanding of human life, one in which man’s life is understood as a pilgrimage or a search. The person who searches may not find the “object” of his search during his earthly life, but it is likely that he will come to a better understanding of himself by means of it.
3. SCIENTISTS IN THE COSMOS: AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO THE DEBATE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION by Stacey E. Ake
Walker Percy’s use of the terms Umwelt (environment) and Welt (symbol world) as well as his separation of events into dyadic and triadic ones, where the latter involve human beings, is brought to bear on the relationship between science and religion with the upshot being that science (a dyadic enterprise) is not equipped to really understand or explain triadic entities (namely, human beings).
4. WALKER PERCY, LANGUAGE, AND HOMO SINGULARIS by John D. Sykes, Jr.
The novelist Walker Percy argued that modern science has a tremendous blind spot in its view of human nature. Unlike purely physical phenomena, which can be explained by the interaction of dyadic relationships, human beings must also be understood in terms of triadic relationships brought into being by symbolic language. The self brought into being by symbolic language is non-material but real, and operates by different “laws” than those that govern dyadic relations. In making this case, Percy drew a sharp line between human and nonhuman language, a line that more recent developments in science has challenged. However, Percy’s central point, that the agent of symbolic language cannot be understood within a materialist framework, remains valid.
5. CONFESSIONS OF A LATE BLOOMING “MISEDUCATED” PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE by Benjamin Alexander
This article provides a survey of Walker Percy’s criticism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls “scientificity,” which entails a constriction of the dynamic interaction of faith and reason. The process can result in the diminishment of ethical considerations raised by science’s impact on public policy. Beginning in the 1950s Percy begins speculating about the negative influence of scientificity. The threat of a political regime using weapons of mass destruction is only one of several menacing developments. The desacrilization of human life from cradle to grave leads Percy to assert that modern science’s impact is often radically incoherent. In The Moviegoer Percy finds his existential and theistic voice that would enable him to advance his critique of science.
To get to the light you need to cross the shadow
If there’s one truth all outlaws know
To get to the light you need to cross the shadow
This phrase from Deltaphonic’s “Buckhorn Saloon” pretty much sums up the spirit animating this astonishing debut album entitled Texas, Texas. Without doubt it’s the Exile on Main Street for our time: dirty, earthy, gritty, soulful, sweaty, troubled, tongue-in-cheek — experiences that could only have emerged from someone who has seen and felt the dark side and therein has achieved a state of grace. The songs are permeated with a wistful world-weary philosophical intelligence that is so unusual for someone so young: Andrew Weekes is an old soul in a young body. Andrew, the prime mover behind Deltaphonic, kinda reminds me of the spirit that animated Amy Winehouse — clever lyrics without being self-consciously so, melodic, soulful, dark, brooding, searingly but eliptically self-revealing — Andrew’s song writing is pure genius. There is not a duff track on this album and not a cover in sight to appease the punters or a label or to mask songwriting inability. This said, when Andrew does play a cover he owns it in a thoroughly uncompromising way. Beyond the immensely gifted base of Andrew’s song writing, there is his psycho-killer guitar work and a voice that can go from “damaged tenderness” to dive bar “fuck it, live now, for tomorrow we die” abandon. Andrew has it all! If you love American music and the subtly blurred genres that informs New Orleans music (country, funk, blues, gospel, reggae), then this album is for you. The band is thus perfectly named!
I had the privilege of seeing them live three nights on the trot. But it was on the third night that Andrew and his new drummer, with whom he’d never played before, absolutely shredded the Apple Barrel — the greatest live performance of my life. The guys put in going on four hours, yes fucking four hours of heart and soul and groove. The ecstatic chemistry between the musicians was palpable and we the audience knew full that we were witnessing the birth of something very special. In years to come there will be people who will claim to have seen them on this particular night. In this troubled world, if this was to be my last night alive, I would have gladly accepted it.
This treasure of band needs our support — they do not do hack work so all the more reason why they need your support. Andrew has to be Andrew if one is going to plumb the depths of this man’s outrageous talent. So PLEASE buy their album now from here or from the “Factory” or go see them live (don’t be a dick head — put a note in the tip jar) and grab a copy of Texas, Texas — and of course spread the word. In the sea of mediocre shite Deltaphonic shines brightly as a beacon of poetic authenticity.
I’m not embarrassed to say that I adore this band — long may this love affair continue (p. s. I write as a fan and have no connection with the band’s business interests whatsoever). Listen freely to these tracks from the album.
Life During Wartime
David’s lyrics describe a Walker Percy-ish post-apocalyptic landscape where a revolutionary hides out in a deserted cemetery, surviving on peanut butter.
Quote from Wikipedia. Read Percy’s Love in the Ruins which is an incredibly prescient novel anticipating the shitstorm we are currently living through now.
The Ring of the Nibelung 101
Roger stylishly and lucidly outlines the timelessness of The Ring’s significance — especially salient to our troubled current times.
Lens of Time: Slime Lapse
H/T to Simon Garnier: Slime molds don’t look like much. Amorphous and gloppy, they spread across the forest floor in a mindless quest to consume whatever lies in their path. But research scientists are now learning that the routes slime molds take through their environment are anything but random. Despite their lack of a brain—or even a neuron—these organisms have evolved a very clever, physical way of making decisions about where to go to find the best food sources. Because slime molds move so slowly (just a few centimeters a day), it’s necessary to speed up time to truly understand their complex behaviors. Simon Garnier and his team at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s SwarmLab use time-lapse macrophotography in their research, and with these techniques are beginning to unravel the nature of these organisms’ “brainless intelligence.” By better understanding how slime molds move and make decisions, Garnier’s team hopes to shed light on how intelligence may have evolved in the first place.
Walker Percy Wednesday 88
The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events.
*****
And, strange to say, at the very moment of his remembering the distant past, the meaning of his present life became clear to him, instantly and without the least surprise as if he had known it all along but had not until now taken the trouble to know that he knew.
*****
Yes, I did all that and succeeded in everything except believing in the Christian God—maybe you were right about one thing after all—what’s more even beat you, made more money, wrote a law book, won an honorary degree, listened to better music.
Now Marion is dead and I can’t believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.
In two seconds he saw that his little Yankee life had not worked after all, the nearly twenty years of making a life with a decent upstate woman and with decent Northern folk and working in an honorable Wall Street firm and making a success of it too. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night’s dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course—what in God’s name was I doing there, and am I doing here?
*****
After you make a living, then what do you do? How do you live?
*****
But maybe he’s right, and it’s one way to keep from going nutty, but maybe there’s something nutty too about an Englishman puttering about his mums while the sceptered isle slowly sinks into the sea.
Chlo-e (Song of the Swamp)
Walker Percy Wednesday 87
What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it’s fool’s gold.
Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk told me many times I should be free to act for myself. I believed him. Just as I believed him when he suggested I take up bird-watching. So, clever straight-A student that I was, I set forth to act for myself. Which, of course, is not doing so at all. I was following instructions. Then how does one ever make the discovery that one can actually be free to act for oneself? I don’t know. I don’t even know how many people, if any, do it.
*****
Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.
*****
He had come to see it as an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a minor deceit, perhaps even a sin.
*****
Was there an unspoken understanding between all of them that what they were doing, knocking little balls around a mountain meadow while the fitful wind bustled about high above them, was after all preposterous but that they had all assented to it and were doing it nevertheless and because, after all, why not? One might as well do one thing as another.
manwithoutqualities 