Friday, November 12, 2010
More Flannery
“Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. I find that this in no way limits my freedom as a writer and that it increases rather than decreases my vision. It is popular to believe that in order to see things clearly one must believe nothing…. To believe nothing is to see nothing.”
(March 17, 1956)
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/11/more-flannery-1.html
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This quote, like the earlier one about nihilism, etc., illustrates why her thoughts and sentiments were best expressed through fiction. It's more than hyperbole and more likely than not a falsehood to assert that "It is popular to believe that in order to see things clearly one must believe nothing…." I rather suspect the problem is the nature of beliefs that color our perceptions (used in the widest sense). Indeed, the very notion of "seeing" might be understood as predicated on beliefs of some sort: perhaps thin, delusional, biased, myopic, the product of wishful thinking, inconsistent, irrational, what have you, but no less beliefs for all that. The fool looks upon the natural world and sees things colored by his beliefs and only a metanoia, or change of heart, or shift in one's mentality, which in part involves a change in beliefs (as it is clearly more than a cognitive re-orientation), can bring about the sort of "realization discovery" that prompts him to now see in the natural world the beauty and glory of God's handiwork, what the Sufis understand as the Divine Names and Qualities in the form of reflections or theophonies manifest in the created world, in other words, to "see" the very Breath of God.