Swinging the chaotic flows to better ends . . .
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| A glacier calving (photo source) |
Our experience of the human world often gives the impression of stability, with change appearing incremental—small and stepwise. However, history shows that this perception can leave us dangerously unprepared for moments when the pace of change suddenly accelerates. When such rapid shifts occur, they are often seen as deviations from the “normal,” making many people vulnerable to the belief that someone can restore to them a past era of imagined greatness. This nostalgia fuels faith in those who then go on to claim they can make the UK, Germany, France, Russia, America, Israel, India, Hungary, or any other nation, “great again” by delivering that new normal, but one that will surpass the old. This, however, is arrant and dangerous nonsense, for history does not move backwards — only forwards, in better or worse directions.
But I am getting ahead of myself, and I should begin by noting that the events of the last few days have made it clear that our geopolitical world is no longer shifting gradually, in slow, incremental steps, but rather moving with the force and speed of an avalanche. Unsurprisingly, many people I know are struggling not only to grasp what is happening, but also to determine how they should respond to this rapid change.
So, today, I want to suggest one important way you—and perhaps we, as a free-religious/spiritual community—might choose to respond. As always, I do not claim this is the only or the right way, but it is the path I have chosen, and I offer it simply as one possibility. At the very least, it is consistent with the creative, inquiring, free and liberative religious tradition to which I, and this church belongs.
And, before I continue, I must clarify that my response does not carry grand cultural or geopolitical implications. Like billions of people before me, I am simply an individual with no significant geopolitical power, caught in changes over which I have very little—if any—control. That is a reality I, and we, must acknowledge with the utmost care.
So, sometime in the early 1980s, while browsing a secondhand bookshop in Bury St Edmunds, I came across a four-part poem written in 1936 by the English poet John Cornford (1915-1936) titled, “Full Moon at Tierz — Before the Storming of Huesca.” The first section of this poem has resurfaced in my mind during every major geopolitical shift I have witnessed over the last 60 years. However, I must note that none — neither the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nor the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 — has felt as momentous as the present moment.
Huesca is both a city and a province in northeastern Spain, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), it became the site of some of the fiercest battles between the Republicans and Franco’s fascist Nationalists, and Tierz is a municipality within Huesca. Cornford survived the battle he describes but was killed in action shortly afterward at Lopera, near Córdoba, on December 28, 1936. As many of you will know, the Nationalists ultimately won the war, which ended in early 1939, and they ruled Spain until Franco’s death in November 1975.
From “Full moon at Tierz — before the storming of Huesca” (1936)
I
The past, a glacier, gripped the mountain wall,
And time was inches, dark was all.
But here it scales the end of the range,
The dialectic’s point of change,
Crashes in light and minutes to its fall.
Time present is a cataract whose force
Breaks down the banks even at its source
And history forming in our hands
Not plasticine but roaring sands,
Yet we must swing it to its final course.
The intersecting lines that cross both ways,
Time future, has no image in space,
Crooked as the road that we must tread,
Straight as our bullets fly ahead.
We are the future. The last fight let us face.
so, let’s now walk through these verses more slowly to tease out what I think is its lesson for us.
The poem begins the night before the battle. In this time of relative stillness and darkness, we can imagine Cornford reflecting both upon how his own small, incremental steps, his personal steps, have brought him to this place far from home, as well as the slow movement of historical forces that, glacier-like, have crept, inch by inch, towards the coming dawn.
This verse can be taken as being analogous to the situation we were all in during the run-up to today. The pace of change had clearly been speeding-up since the beginning of the millennium, but even then things continued to move incrementally in a way that most people still felt was “normal.”
But Cornford reveals then he knows the dawn will prove to be the end of the range over which the glacier of the once-normal has for so long slowly been pushing. The dawn will be the moment when, suddenly, the overhanging weight of the glacier will cause the speed of movement of everything to change from the slow and incremental to the fast and precipitate, as a mass of ice crashes uncontrollably in lights and minutes to its fall. Cornford, the Marxist, calls this the dialectic’s point of change, but we can also call it more neutrally, the tipping point, i.e. the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a sudden, larger, more significant change.
Cornford, the individual, knows he cannot stop this moment happening, and he knows he has no choice but to ride the shattering glacier as it falls. As he says, “Time present is a cataract whose force / Breaks down the banks even at its source” and the “history forming in our hands” is something he realises can no longer so easily be shaped by human hands. The material available to him and his comrades in this fall is no longer like that of beautifully malleable plasticine, that easily keeps the shapes we give it, but instead, it is like roaring sands, a chaotic flow of material that we simply cannot fully grasp nor shape. Nevertheless, as Cornford sees, in this moment, the only thing we can do is to play our small part in trying to swing this chaotic flow so that its final course is a better than the course it could so follow.
This is, I think, analogous to the situation we now find ourselves in. A tipping point has been reached, and our once slow-moving and relatively stable glacier has gone over the edge. Like Cornford, we need to acknowledge that we have no choice but to fall with the chaotic flow, one which we cannot hope to shape in an old plasticine-like fashion. All we can do is try to swing the flow to a better end that might turn out to be the case if we don’t try to do our little bit.
Then, as Cornford moves over the tipping point and begins to crash in light and minutes to his own fall, he realises that the chaotic flows in which he is caught up are “intersecting lines that cross both ways” and so, as he descends further into the maelstrom, he cannot, right at this moment, easily see what the future will bring, this is because in the unfolding chaos it has “no image in space.” Nevertheless, although “crooked as the road that [he] must tread” and “straight as [his] bullets fly ahead,” he realises something profound, and it is this that I wish to bring your attention today. He sees, as clearly as it is possible to see anything in such moments, that he and his comrades “are the future,” and that this is the case even if the coming battle turns out to be for them “the last fight” that they will personally face.
This, I think, is analogous to work we need to be preparing for in our own time of chaotic flows in which there is no single line of progress to follow because there are now in play countless lines of movement, some straight, some crooked, and all intersecting in ways that are pulling in opposite directions. But, at this moment of time, I — and I am suggesting we — must continue to have faith in ourselves, I must have faith myself, I must have faith in others who are my neighbours, faith in the power of cooperative community, and faith that everything is bound together — religio — in a profound intra-connective unity with all of nature. This is the only way that I can continue to play a real, if always modest and apparently insignificant part in swinging the chaotic flows to a final, future course that is better than the one it might have taken if I had not had the faith to fight what I will call the good fight.
But in this fight, as the dialectic’s point of change sweeps me and all of us over the edge, I find that my strength is not in the wielding of a rifle and the firing of bullets, but in a profound belief, sometimes beyond all immediate evidence, that in a moving chaotic world, the stable, normal ground I am seeking is, as Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei saw, always to be found in the fundamental principle taught by Śākyamuni Buddha, and indeed by Henri Bergson, that there is a creative evolution which is always manifesting in infinitely adaptive and transformative ways, and also in the gospel of creative love taught by the Rabbi Jesus who once said:
“A new commandment I give you: that you love one another. As I have loved you, so too must you love one another. By this all will know you are disciples to me, if you have love for one another” (John 13: 34-35 David Bentley Hart — The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd ed.).
I am of the belief that my free-religious faith in these two things can help me, I believe us, to play a real, if always modest, part in swinging the chaotic flows to better ends than would occur if we simply did nothing.
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