To Question the Unquestioned. LO27417

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Date: 10/16/01


Replying to LO27409 --

Dear Organlearners,

Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes:

>I've been studying a textual work of Love, both
>corporeal and spiritual that was written during four
>years of war 1940-45 but mainly during the "blitz of
>London" where the author was stationed as a part
>time fireman. In the footnotes the author leaves these
>three impressions.
>
>" First not to demand, not to interfere, not to possess
> - to LET be; second, to cherish, to liberate to suffer
>to unfold - to let BE."
>
>In those words I see though somewhat withheld the
>notion of nurturing "becoming".

Greetings dear Andrew,

What this person did, was to give an apt description of what we now can
call the essentiality liveness ("becoming-being") of creativity.

It is just as striking is that this person gave this description as a
result of having had to heal from the spiritual wounds caused by war.

War is terrible. People who made and is making war know nothing of the 7Es
(seven essentialities of creativity). Yet the "science" of war is to an
large extend to impair as many 7Es as far as possible among the enemy
forces while preventing the impairing of each of the 7Es as far as
possible among own forces.

Let me describe to you in dedicated langauge the stark reality of war with
respect to liveness.

A bomb is intended to end "becoming" suddenly by subjecting the enemy to
massive "entropy production" (the fundamental "becoming") in a very short
time so as to distort the enemy's "becoming" beyond its adaptive
capabilities in response to physico-chemical disturbances.

A disease like antrax is intended to end "becoming" slowly by subjecting
the enemy to the minute "entropy production" of a few germs so as to
distort by their multiplicative reproduction over a long time the enemy's
"becoming" beyond the control of his/her immunological system.

A knife is used to cut the jugulars in the throat to stop the flow of
oxygen rich blood to the brain and hence cause its death (no "becoming"
any more) in a couple of minutes.

As for myself, I cannot see even the smallest justification to reconcile
love with war. Is war not one of the unquestionables? To question war in
peace time is dangerous -- "you are weakening our army". To question war
under martial law is treason -- "you are aiding the enemy".

Love tries to prevent war by responding immediately to the slightest
injustice done to any person by setting wrongs right long before that
injustice will grow like a cancer to change that person into the enemy.

Love promotes the "becoming" of all humans, animals and plants in a
harmonious symphony rather than fix permanetly their "being" by a
dissonant cacophony like war does.

>I just turned the page over to see what followed.
>It's a new chapter entitled, TRUTHFULNESS.
>It says that love is truth.

Yes Andrew, why cannot we live up to it? Perhaps we have forgotten
the wholeness of language.

It strikes me that the Saxon (OE) "lufian"=(to)love and "lifian"=(to)live
come from the same proto Germanic root. It strikes me further that truth
is derived from the Saxon "treoan"=(to)true. This verb, which is seldom
used in today's English, means to match as far as possible any form with
fidelity to any genuine form.

We still use this "treoan" in my mother tongue Afrikaans in for example
the adjective "trou". It has many meanings like accurate, devoted,
faithful, loyal, regular, true and trusty. The whole sentence will
determine which meaning it has. We also have the verb "trou"=(to)marry
which means that a man and a woman commit themselves to match each other
in spiritual form, to live for each other and to love each other.

For example, we say in English that the person's measured height is 1.65
meters. We mean that we have matched the form (called length) of the
person to 1 meter as the standard ("genuine") form of lenth. We certainly
did not mean that we deformed a person into the form of "measuring stick".
We also could have said that we have trued the person's length to 1.65
meter.

Is it not fanrastic how the verbs love, live and true describe some of the
many lanes on one and the same way.

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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