Rodak's Writings: a Flash Fiction

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Somewhere West of Eden

Auugh! I roll over out of a dream of scratching in the hard, dry earth with a blunt, brittle stick to choke off the insistent yelping of my alarm clock, Judas. Yes, my alarm clock has a name. I have named everything here. I’ve been naming ever since I was appointed to the role of Adam on this plantation. Naming is an Adamic task -- one of many, I’m coming to learn. I give all things biblical tags, as is most fit and right. Nobody wants to be jerked out of a sound sleep by a clock named Brad. Just as no one wants to wipe his ass with tissue ripped from a roll named Kristen or Kayla. So I am currently flushing bemerded Leah into septic tank Laban. Sending old cow-eyes home to daddy. Only problem is, there ain’t no Eve. My helpmeet has decamped for New York City -- or Jezebel Junction, as I’m calling it -- leaving me here to struggle with the damned serpents all on my lonely. Sometimes I pray to the local deity, Yalkumbaknah, to spit in the dirt, stir up a hunk of mud, and sculpt me another. Sometimes I fuckin’ count my blessings. Yo, Lord! Wanna build me a woman? I gotcha bone rye cheer! It ain’t no rib, though--it’s King David, proudly erect on his pelted throne, with his chubby little sons, Absalom and Solly, rolling around at his feet. [Now enter slinky Lilith of the Five Fingers, stage left, to get a grip on the situation.] Oh, yeah. Just call me Onan and pass me a wad of Rachel. End of chapter, end of verse. Word.

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Readings: Thinking About Thinking

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Below are more excerpts from Rudolf Steiner's seminal work, The Philosophy of Freedom. While contemplating his words about our perceptions of the outside world, it is important to keep in mind that we, ourselves, are objects of the world outside. We know ourselves directly and initially only as percepts, just as we know trees, tables, sunlight, and the starry sky first as percepts. Everything that Steiner says here also pertains to you as an existing being:

In thinking we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know, not as it issues from the center of the world, but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking which projects into us the universal world existence.

[…]



In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

[…]

To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to place it into the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar character of our organization… . A thing cut off from the world-whole does not exist. All isolating has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the universe divides itself up into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, thing and mental picture, matter and force, object and subject, etc. What appears to us in observation as separate parts becomes combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions. By thinking we fit together again into one piece all that we have taken apart through perceiving.

By thinking, we also, then, fit ourselves together again as integral parts of the cosmos which is the context from which we have torn ourselves through the self-creation of that suffering personality which we know as "ego."
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Quote du Jour: from The Philosophy of Freedom

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The following is from the Preface to the first edition of Rudolf Steiner's seminal work The Philosophy of Freedom, first published in 1894 and revised in 1918:

[W]e do not want any knowledge of the kind that has become frozen once and for all into rigid academic rules, preserved in encyclopedias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

Yes. And this is precisely the mind-set that is capable of producing the artist and/or the saint.
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